


Three Winters, Four Springs

by halotolerant



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alcohol Withdrawal, Anal Fingering, Canon-Typical Violence, Dubious Consent, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Extremely Dubious Consent, Hand Jobs, M/M, Marathon Sex, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Period Typical Attitudes, Psychic Bond, Psychic Wolves, Rape/Non-con Elements, Slow Burn, Telepathic Bond, Wolfcubs, animal birth, initial Sir John Franklin/Captain Francis Crozier, this isn't everybody lives nobody dies but not EVERYBODY dies so I'm still ahead of canon here, which is - Freeform, within the framework of heat sex mandated by your job
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-10-28 13:42:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 49,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17788472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: Nelson had a sister. It is noble when it is in broadsheets, when it is spoken of in metaphors, in bonds and leadership. Not in the close, stinking intimacy of it, not in a small and far from soundproof cabin with a tub of whale grease and two wolves circling each other.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Additional Warnings** : Set in a fusion with the world of Bear and Monette's 'Iskryne' series i.e. soldiers (or sailors as here) are telepathically bonded to wolves and therefore undergo 'wolves made them do it' sex when the wolves are in heat - this is, at best, dubious consent, and arguably non-con in the context of Franklin and Crozier. 
> 
> Also still set in Victorian times in the English navy, so sexism, racism, colonialism and homophobia. 
> 
> Also still set in the Arctic where a bunch of said naval men are trying to doing something unnecessary with inadequate equipment and, like, a killer spirit bear after them, so whilst I'm saving as many characters as I can (if I want misery I'll watch the show!) not everyone (or every wolf) lives. 
> 
> If you want any clarification on specific tags or other issues, feel free to ask in comments before reading
> 
>  **Notes** : Huge thanks to **elfwhistletree** my beta reader ♥ Remaining mistakes are my own. I have lifted chunks of the scripted conversations where they suit the story I'm telling. 
> 
> This fic is FINISHED, bar editing, and will be updated at least every other day 
> 
> IO LUPERCALIA \o/

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **PLEASE NOTE **This chapter includes an encounter between Franklin and Crozier that is non or very dubiously consensual. If you wish to 'fast forward' through it, stop at:****
> 
> ****_It is a relief when Ezekiel and Sir John arrive from across the ice._ ** **
> 
> ****_It is a disaster._ ** **
> 
> ****and search (Ctrl+F) for the word 'razor', skip to this and pick up the main plot** **

_September 1846_

 

The last of what passes for warmth in an Arctic summer is being sucked from the air, and Shelagh is waiting on the Terror’s deck when Sir John arrives for his dinner, though Francis is not.

 

Her irritation at this absence isn’t put into words between them – not even the approximated picture-senses of words that are forever flowing between human and wolf when they are bonded. No, Shelagh has given up trying to reason with Francis on this.

 

 _They are all we have_ , she has said to him across the bond before, remonstrating. _They are Pack_.

 

And then, more than once, she’s pushed through the shared memories, hazy and overlaid, of that small, stinking tent on the shore at Beechey Island back in spring, as though that proof might sway Francis as it would any sensible member of her own species.

 

But the emotions those memories bring from him hurt her. He never means them to – he never means them to be shared, retreats into himself, curls up around his own thoughts like an animal with a belly wound – but they are man and wolfsister, and she knows all the flavours of his regrets.

 

So they do not discuss it, now. And today when the signal was received from Erebus she heard of it from Crécy, Lt. Edward Little’s wolfbrother, and took herself to the deck to pad and pace without a word.

 

That is how it has been with them for months, now. Ever since the winter, and the spring, at Beechey Island. All along the Peel Sound and most of the way – or all of it, to hear some men talk – to the Pacific.

 

Wolves are not by nature deeply reflective, nor given over much to thoughts of the past or of the future. This nurtures optimism, of a sort. Or at least, Shelagh seems always to believe, with each encounter she and Francis are brought into with Sir John and Ezekiel, that this time things will go more properly how she wishes them.

 

How they ought to be, in a pack.

 

Bonded as they are, Francis can feel this keenly. And then feel her irritations and frustrations breaking through her resolutions when Ezekiel and Horatio actually come aboard with their brothers. Ezekiel is winched carefully up from the boat in the Terror’s wolf-sling, dignified as potatoes. Horatio, younger, with that unusual reddish coat that marks him easily in all this world of white and black, makes great show of climbing the ladder unaided, claws scratching into the paintwork.

 

Reaching the deck he is panting, breath clouding the air, and proud and triumphant, until it is hard to tell whether the smog of smugness newly intruding is more him or his brother Commander James Fitzjames.

 

Shelagh is soon struggling not to bare her teeth.

 

And this pique, for a while, brings Francis and his wolfsister into sympathy.

 

 _Only asked for a goddamn ice report_ , Francis reminds her as he comes to join them all, making his way the short distance to the great cabin where the finest linen and china have been lovingly laid out, and the silver dishes made ready for the wolves. _I wanted to speak to Mr Read. Who indeed they have not brought._

Shelagh is still acutely, uncomfortably aware of Ezekiel and Horatio in her territory, preoccupied with concerns about the placement of her bowl. The Navy, for their sins, consider wolves to hold status in level with their brothers, anything else seeming to smack of Republicanism. And so, as Francis is Second in Command to Sir John, Shelagh ought to be only the second highest in rank amongst her lupine colleagues.

 

Yet Shelagh is the sole female of this expedition, which would make her alpha female of the wolf pack by default, and Terror is her ship.

 

 _Our ship_ , Francis says gently, and smiles for the first time in a while.

 

_Our ship, but Ezekiel is brother to the human alpha, but the human alpha is…_

 

Shelagh cannot name what is wrong, and perhaps that is nothing to do with her species; Francis would struggle too, to name it, to write it, even if ever he could.

 

To pin down what it is about this expedition that leaves him never at his ease.

 

To a wolf, unhappiness is most usually a symptom of a weak pack. Shelagh is certainly working on that assumption, and she may well be right. And so every time the senior officers meet Shelagh hopes that finally all will be well, and every time she is disappointed.

 

Francis feels this justifies his own cynicism without the need for further argument.

 

Some things cannot be mended.

 

And oh but Sir John and Fitzjames excel themselves at dinner this day. The assembled company get every last bit of it – Sir John’s unfair dismissal from the Van Diemen’s Land governorship, Sir John’s opinion of the Hobart press, and then Fitzjames and the endless, endless stories of the Opium War.

 

What edifying spectacles both episodes make! What source of pride for the British Navy and Britain herself!

 

Such nuance Shelagh is not very interested in; for her part she informs Francis that Ezekiel is expecting her to groom him despite it being a time of year when she has little to no interest in that kind of physicality, and that Horatio is annoying her exactly as he always does.

 

She cannot seem to pinpoint it closer than that. Something in Horatio’s scent name, even – _evening rose crushed in heat_ – has apparently itched at her from their first meeting. Francis worries that the wolves are suffering a surfeit of mutual loathing overspilling from their human brothers in this case; it is not as though he and Fitzjames have ever even been cordial.

 

“…ready for my official portrait. Did you see it?” the man is demanding now, arrogant, all fine profile and lustrous hair in the lamplight.

 

“Tell us about birdshit island, why don’t you James?” Francis places down his fork. He makes no particular effort to conceal his boredom, his disdain, and in any case they are in the pack sense between them all, man to wolf to wolf to man, a whole room of dyspeptic dislike. “That’s a capital story.”

 

Silence, for a moment, thick and awkward in a room that is despite their current climes starting to feel too hot.

 

Besides Ezekiel, Horatio and Shelagh, is here too, of course, and Leo who is brother to Lt Hodgson and Pisces who is bonded to Irving. Dr Peddie, having not the pretensions of the Erebus’ surgeon Dr Stanley, has not a wolf of his own, and given the size of the ship all to the good that he does not.

 

Wolves make for a full wardroom when naval officers dine. Wolves make for a full ship altogether, which is why His Britannic Majesty’s Navy have restricted the matching of wolves and men to commissioned officers. There can be enough of a pack sense from this alone to greatly improve the control of the whole crew, even leaving aside what wolves can sense about atmospheric changes and the efficiency with which they communicate across great distance. Oh yes, it has been shown time and again in formal reports, and great reams of poetry composed on the subject, how well a close-knit pack, surrounding an alpha female of fine stature, can aid the success of a mission.

 

Francis’ cabin is filled with books telling tales of such successes. And what they tell is grand, and often even halfway true.

  
It is what they omit. That is what matters.

 

“Mr Read and I chatted about the ice today,” Sir John begins now, clearly attempting to clear the tension – at his feet Ezekiel has risen, showing off his size to the other wolves assembled ( _more fat than fettle_ , Francis has said to Shelagh before, and she has shared the delightful mental sensation that is a wolf laughing). “He tells me we have started sailing past slabs he thinks are not part of the summer break-up.”

 

“Old ice?” Humour extinguished, there’s a chill in Francis’ stomach, a prickling at his skin he wants to be able to call irrational.

 

Sir John senses it, waves it away, pushes back a mental sensation to Francis’ mind like patting the head of a child. Sir John’s use of what pack sense they have is always so – a man writing a letter with his hands in oven gloves. “He’s not concerned. He thinks we’re close to an intersection with another channel coming down from the north, bringing bergy bits with it. But it means our little summer strait is likely coming to an end.” He looks around the table. “It has yet to be named, and I thought Sir James Ross might be honoured thusly. Do you approve Francis?”

 

Francis takes a long drink, rather than speak what’s on his tongue, composes himself: “He’ll be very pleased.”

 

Fitzjames is looking at Sir John, smirking as though he thinks Francis cannot see.

 

As though he thinks Francis cannot hear, though surely Fitzjames has noticed too, by now, that in amongst the cottony nonsense that is most of this expedition’s pack sense, the conduit between the two of them has always been unhelpfully, inexplicably clear? If Francis believed in God he might accuse the deity of irony: nothing could do less for the harmony and success of this undertaking, than that he and Commander James Fitzjames are well connected to each other.

 

Shelagh, meantime, has caught the name ‘Ross’, and in her turn recalls _crunch of new snow on earth_ , which is to say Ross’ brother Davy. _Davy_ , she reminds Francis, longingly.

 

 _I miss them too_ , Francis tells her, and damn Horatio and Fitzjames if they do hear it and smirk afresh.

 

Of the many thousand things to dislike about Commander James Fitzjames, Francis supposes that the man calling his wolfbrother Horatio ought to be the least of them. It is a common enough piece of stupidity, after all. There are more wolves called Horatio than could be dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy.

 

But it is amazing how irksome the little things can be, given time, given proximity.

 

Which two qualities, of course, are the most abundant things on voyages of Arctic discovery, saving perhaps snow and idiotic decisions.

 

Francis opens his mouth to try again to speak of the ice. But then suddenly there is a noise – and all around the table officers are tensing as the wolves all catch it together – the sudden panic in the men, the scent of blood, the sound of a man choking.

 

-

 

Shelagh can hear whatever Ezekiel and Horatio would like her to hear, and they have no compunction about letting her know how much her brother is disdained.

 

In her turn, she lets it filter back to Francis in a way that reminds him of his mother letting his father sleep in his own piss, as though it might trigger some resolve to change.

 

“There is nothing worse than a man who has lost his joy,” Fitzjames is muttering at Sir John as they pace the Terror’s deck before departing. Oh, Fitzjames knows how to be agreeable, truly he does, has charmed his way around half the fucking Admiralty and now he’s here, somehow third in command despite his lack of Arctic experience, and in charge of magnetic observations he’s never been sufficiently trained in not to be surprised by the gyrations of a compass past the bloody Arctic circle.

 

“And he’s a lushington to boot,” Fitzjames is continuing.

 

Below decks, Francis reaches for his glass. Alcohol numbs the edges of the pack sense. He’ll hear less of this, in a few fingers of whisky’s time, and be less conscious of the poor consumptive crewman coughing out his lungs in sickbay.

 

And if Fitzjames knows, senses, each time Francis does this, well that is a problem for tomorrow.

 

Sir John is defending him; of this Francis is vaguely aware, and then the conversation fades away: Shelagh is getting bored again herself, not bothering to pay attention to the secondhand words any more, and is pacing the great cabin, nosing irritably at where the intruders sat, at the things that they touched that now smell of them.

 

 _At least this one can hear us_ , she points out, coming away from the chess set, which Fitzjames had had his fingers all over, in between scratching at Horatio’s neck; a few short red hairs litter the floor.

 

_The fact that he can tell when I think Sir John is spouting pure and unfiltered bilgewater is not very helpful to me, though, is it?_

When Fitzjames had talked of earlier of the likely success of this expedition, of their ‘rapid progress’, of the power of their great technology, then Francis had wanted to use the pack sense for once. Had wanted to push through to Fitzjames’ mind even a modicum of some of his own memories of this world, of ice, of darkness, of men eating rats and pissing blood.

 

Teach him something, maybe even to his own benefit.

 

But connecting to the pack reminds Francis of… of Beechey. Of what will come around again, in spring, unless they’re free of the ice by then. And he could not bear to do it.

 

Now Horatio and Ezekiel will both be being winched down to the waiting boat, ready for transfer back to the Erebus with their brothers. At the moment that both of them are off the Terror, something in Shelagh unwinds and relaxes; Francis feels it too.

 

 _Next time it will be easier_ , Shelagh announces firmly.

 

Francis pours again, fills up the glass, downs it fast.

 

 _They’ll need me, in the end_ , Shelagh points out, not with any particular pride – it is because she is the only bitch for one hundred miles in every direction that she is sure of it – but with a certainty Francis only wishes he could share.

 

-

 

Papist and Irish and Middle Bred, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was never particularly likely to make officer. He joined as an ordinary seaman and was turned before the mast. He had scrubbed his share of decks.

 

The promotion to lieutenant, he had expected to feel like a validation.

 

The bonding to his wolf, he had expected to be transcendent. For so did men, and all poetry, describe it. And then he and his brother would have their own vessel, soon enough, and discover many wonders.

 

He’d opened the door in the nursing stables in Portsmouth wondering why it was so quiet. The little scrap of fur in the middle of the basket in a cold stall he’d momentarily mistaken for a cushion.

 

“She’s still alive, I think,” said the man behind him, pushing past. “The mother won’t nurse her. That can be the way, with pups like this.”

 

“Her?”

 

The man shrugged, looked again at the little notebook he carried. “Lt. Francis Crozier, assigned Pup 7 out of Victory, by Spruce, bitch – that’s what I’ve got here.”

 

“I thought they chose us. The pups, I mean.”

 

“They do. If she doesn’t want to do with you that’s that.”

 

There was something about how he said it that made Francis look up at him, quick, fearful.

 

“And then you’ll look for someone else for her?”

 

“Very little use for breeding,” the man observed, philosophically. “She’s at the right time for you but if not… It’s not such a loss all told, they factor that into their accounts and budgets, they don’t expect ‘em all to make it, no more than lambs.”

 

For a moment, Francis saw what was happening as the insult it was. And if he refused a wolf – if he said, _I deserve the best, not a runt who is not expected to live_ – there was a decent likelihood he’d never be back.

 

No need, then, to have him, and all his undesirable qualities, in any good Captain’s pack at all.

 

Then again, he might be fortunate. Some right-thinking Admiralty secretary might quite understand, and send him off to another pup, a strong male with a great future. Not likely, but possible.

 

How would they end her, then? In a bag, in a river, like a kitten? Or with a knife?

 

Francis paused a moment longer in the doorway.

 

Then he went into the stall and knelt on the cold flagstones. Waited.

 

She was breathing, rather shallow and fast. Her nose buried into her side as though she were cold. And yes, there, one leg not quite right, unfinished so that there was no paw to speak of.

 

“Hello,” Francis murmured to her.

 

She opened an eye. And he was hit with it, suddenly, with all of her: her fear, her distrust, her confusion – mother hadn’t wanted her, it was cold here, men came round thinking on death and now this stranger...

 

“I’m all you’ve got,” Francis told her.

 

But oh it was something, it was indeed something to feel her mind reaching to his, see her eyes gazing up black and wide and almost see himself through them.

 

She had risen, wobbling, and gone to his lap and fallen again. He gathered her up, wrapping his coat around her, and felt how strong her fear still was.

 

If there was a feeling of searching and finding that other bonding pairs experienced, they never had it. She had to have him, he had to have her. And in that they had some sympathy, at least.

 

Feeding her became the first, highest imperative. Fears about what her gender would mean, for either of them, seemed foolishly hasty, given her apparent likelihood of survival.

 

Her mother hadn’t given her a wolf-name, just as she hadn’t fed her.

 

Francis called her Shelagh.

 

-

 

Visiting the Erebus is, by and large, less of trial to both Francis and Shelagh than having the men and wolves of the Erebus come to Terror. Off her own territory (it should _all_ be her territory, Francis cannot help but think, it should _all_ be hers) Shelagh is more relaxed about such encounters.

 

Francis, for his part, has come to the meeting feeling something of relief, since it would appear Sir John has finally seen fit to make some kind of response to the ice newly come into view on their horizon.

 

It is a relief that is short lived.

 

“We must be nearly in sight of King William Land,” Sir John observes, dismissing all concern with a brief wave, another psychic patting “Then it is but another two hundred miles before we can pick up the western charts and draw in this final piece of the puzzle once and for all.”

 

And Fitzjames offers a ‘hear hear’ just in case his arse-licking were insufficiently apparent, and after a moment Horatio goes to headbutt Ezekiel in a manner that is disgustingly sycophantic.

 

This interrupts Ezekiel from eating from a china bowl with rosebuds around the rim, apparently picked out and painted by the fair hand of Lady Jane. It is the same design as the little one given to the monkey. Francis feels a tinge of nausea himself, overspill of Shelagh’s disgust at the sight. She won’t touch the canned food herself, and doesn’t like Francis to. It is not unusual for her to have whimsies of this kind regarding what is proper, and Francis indulges what he can, in the vain hope it might compensate for what he cannot.

 

Such as now, clearing his throat, attempting diplomacy:

 

“Our situation is more dire than you may understand,” he tells Sir John – and the table, the table of officers and their wolves who ought to feel more attached to him than anyone, for he is the one with the sister, here. “That is not just ice ahead. That is the pack ice, drifting, and you are proposing that we cross it in _September_. Even with leads it could take us weeks of picking our way through it. And you know what our wolves are telling us of the scent of cold coming. We may not have weeks.”

 

“Well, weeks at most,” pipes up Fitzjames, as though he knows a single fucking thing about anything. Francis ignores him, turns to one in whom he is more confident of finding sense.

 

“You’ve seen the sun dogs, Graham? How many have there been now?”

 

Lieutenant Gore doesn’t want to be involved in this argument. Francis can tell that much even without hearing Aeneas via Shelagh tell him so. But he speaks truth nonetheless, he’s a good man: “Three,” he tells the room.

 

Francis turns back to his captain. “It’s already a colder year than last,” he begins, “and the wolves called that right. Shelagh called that one right.”

 

It ought to be in the pack sense. Sir John should know from Ezekiel, who should know from Shelagh, the sincerity, the truth of Francis’ concerns. It ought to be as easy as breathing, the trust between them.

 

But Ezekiel is still eating, and Sir John pastes on an indulgent smile: “I’ve been to the Arctic, Francis,” he points out, just that hint of steel in his words, and now Ezekiel rises, putting himself above the other wolves present, shaking out his ruff, spraying fragments of tinned beef and tomato in the process.

 

“On foot,” Francis points out.

 

 _Stop_ , Shelagh says.

 

“And you nearly starved,” Francis adds.

 

_Don’t._

 

“And not all of your men returned.”

 

 _Not like that_ , says Shelagh. _Please._ She’s belly up under Ezekiel, placating, soothing, and if she can do it… Francis takes half a breath, bites his tongue, spreads his hands.

 

“I say this with all due honour.”

 

“So what would you propose instead? Wait out winter here?”

 

Carefully and thoroughly, Francis lays out his plan. The necessity of heading east. The various options they may find there – a passage round the lee side of King William peninsula, perhaps, if it is in fact an island, or at the very least a safe harbour, a sheltered nook for a winter which will only freeze a short time. Their best and probably only chance.

 

He makes himself speak of spring. The rain falls on the just and unjust, and spring will come whether he wants it to or not. And maybe, maybe it will be easier, next time.

 

And maybe then, after…that, if he lets that happen, then it will work, bring him and Sir John into closer understanding, and they will all be able to travel on safely, amicably together.

 

“As an old friend said, Sir John, this place wants us dead.” He’s meeting Sir John’s eye, speaking words that came first from Miss Cracroft, a reminder of all they have to lose between them.

 

“Who is this friend? Does he also write melodrama?” Fitzjames – fucking Fitzjames – has to pipe up of course. Can’t let a moment pass without a reminder of his fair presence, his ready wit.

 

Francis slams down his fist on the table.

 

In an instant Horatio has bared his teeth, snapping in Francis’ direction, and suddenly Shelagh is on Horatio in a pounce, her mouth at his neck, teeth bare, only for Horatio to scramble out from under and face her down.

 

All the wolves in the room spring up. This could be true violence in a second.

 

The pack sense should tell Sir John how bad this truly is. How bad this could get.

 

But this is a modern ship, with a locomotive engine in the belly, a bloodstream of lead piping and a store of food in small red cans. If this is different too, perhaps that is all.

 

Francis, though, soothing Shelagh as best he can when he still so angry, so fearful himself, cannot but be hopeless.

 

Thomas Blanky, ice master, friend and no fool is in his corner, but all for naught.

 

The chance has gone. Sir John has made his decision. Sir John wants to push on west.

 

-

 

_January 1847_

 

For all Francis and Shelagh’s inauspicious beginnings, it had gone well enough with them when they were travelling with Parry, and then again with Ross.

  
Which was to say, with Orion, and then with Davy.

 

With Ross’ brother Davy, indeed, there had been cubs, defying all predictions of Shelagh’s utility as a breeding animal. Only three, it was true, but none with a thing wrong with them and all now bonded, all serving with honour across the width of the globe.

 

Ross, Francis had trusted. Not a perfect man – and who could claim to be? But Ross knew ice, and Ross had had the pack sense. They’d come close to death at the South Pole, and more than once, and in the very Erebus and Terror Sir John Franklin now had at his disposal. But they’d held it all together, him and Ross; kept their Pack safe and delivered them home.

 

With Ross and before him with Parry, Francis hadn’t feared and hated the coming of spring. Not thought it a pleasant time, not a time to dwell on, but not something to dread.

 

Something that he had believed he could endure, if it were the price of this mission, of getting a step closer to a commission of his own.

 

Whereas now, with their first sunrise of 1847 a brief, red stain on the horizon, Francis shudders and calculates fingers of whisky, days of waiting, hours of endurance.

 

Both ships have been beset in the ice for months now. It is a barren hell without and a tedious monotony within. Every thought any of the party could have has been found and shared, the conversations worn through, the plans for the future rehearsed and polished.

 

When Francis wakes one late March day too hot in his bunk, when he finds himself swiping at Jopson, irritated to be brought a muffler when it is _so warm, so warm, man, can’t you tell?_ When this happens, the sheer novelty of it should be some kind of gratification.

 

It is not. The weight of his despair could sink them all.

 

For a moment he even thinks of it. Of falling over the edge, breaking through, descending into something blue and clear and cold enough to make everything just… stop.

 

Only the ice wouldn’t break, of course. Not to his weight. He’d fracture his arm, perhaps, no more. Nothing in him is as strong as what is out there.

 

In a company of men apparently determined to see if ignoring the truth will cause it to go away, Francis cannot fault himself for having tried to forget that this will happen.

 

But all the same, spring has come.  


And Shelagh, pacing round the great cabin, pulling together a nest of her blankets, is getting ready.

 

-

 

In 1845, Shelagh’s heat had come as scheduled, well before the expedition was due to set off. Despite her success with Davy, there was no interest from the stud in breeding her with any animal in particular and Francis had taken them both to the facility in Sheerness; anonymous, bearable, another Captain who Francis had never met before, and that man’s brother meeting the need, polite afterwards, brisk, reasonable.

 

1846 was Beechey, and as much as at the time Francis had thought that nothing could be worse than that had been, he sees now that then at least then the bloody ships had been afloat in the thaw.

 

 _We haven’t planned_ , Francis thinks, and wants to punch something. His fault, just as much as anyone’s, that they have not. But why not? This was inevitable, ever since the ice closed around the ships. Why have he and Sir John allowed each other to ignore what they knew was coming?

 

There is a protocol in heat management, as in all things for the Navy. Two concerns predominate: maintenance of discipline for the men and preservation of the command structure. The mass breedings – every male and his brother with the bitch and hers – such as might have been undergone in some Elizabethan fleet - are strictly out of the question.

 

But the wolves do not know this – or if they do, they do not remember when the blood is up and the moment comes, and by this point the wolves want so much, so desperately, that men, even disciplined ones, will forget too, and make any attempt to get their wolves to the bitch and themselves to her brother.

 

Separation of the breeding pair from all the others, ideally by a stretch of water, is therefore the first and best option. At Beechey the men pitched a small canvas tent and there Shelagh and Ezekiel, and Francis and Sir John, had remained for two days. And as bad as it was, they were at least concealed from the eye and out of earshot of the waiting ships.

 

Now, beset as they are, any man or his brother may walk the ice from Erebus to Terror. Utterly clear, from months ago, that this was going to be a problem, but the officers have never spoken of it.

 

Do they sit around the table, Francis wonders, and scorn to even plan contingencies, finding it impossible to believe that they could desire him? Believe themselves immune to the drives of the wolves when such a prize as him is all that is on offer?

 

By that token, can they be imagining that he himself desires Sir John? Of all people?

 

Francis is finding it progressively harder to think. He is sweating – it makes his clothes damp, sore against his skin. Pacing his cabin, he cannot finish thoughts. There is a low pressure in his stomach. Every hair on his body tingles.

 

Shelagh is irritable, aching, wanting: _Why aren’t they here yet?_

 

Francis had ordered Thomas Blanky to make the trip to Erebus and inform Sir John of the situation – the man and his wolf are so tone deaf to the pack that it is just possible they won’t have noticed it themselves. And if between Sir John and Fitzjames there is the sense God gave a clam then by now the officers on that ship will be dosing their brothers with laudanum, and making ready for the officers of Terror to come and join them at that somewhat easier to bear distance.

 

It will be for the petty officers here, the unbonded – Mr Hornby and Mr Thomas the mates, and Blanky and MacBean as masters – to manage the affairs of the ship for the next few days.

 

Shelagh whines at him. She is more than ready, sick with waiting. Troubled, somewhat, by his distress, but it is incomprehensible to her. When it comes to fucking, wolves cannot comprehend shame.

 

Francis pours himself a full tumbler of whisky. And another, drinking so fast he leaves himself panting for breath.

 

Despite himself, he is starting to feel the rushing of blood. All is heavy between his legs, and as the link between himself and Shelagh blurs and fuzzes, he feels as though he is wet, as though he is loose, ready. More than once he catches himself with his hand gone to his groin, starting to caress.

 

It is a relief when Ezekiel and Sir John arrive from across the ice.

 

It is a disaster.

 

“A necessary evil, and for the good of the men,” Sir John announces as he walks in and pulls his gloves off, or something like that, some pious and hypocritical nonsense, Francis cannot _think_. He is too hot and he wants to take all his clothes off and he _does not_ , he does not want that at all.

 

He is sitting at the table in the great cabin as though that will keep him Captain.

  
Sir John’s cheeks are red, and once his gloves are gone, and his cap and his scarf and his overcoat and his jacket he is still undressing, and quickly.

 

Nelson had a sister. It is noble when it is in broadsheets, when it is spoken of in metaphors, in bonds and leadership. Not in the close, stinking intimacy of it, not in a small and far from soundproof cabin with a tub of whale grease and two wolves circling each other.

 

Ezekiel is drunk on her scent but Shelagh is twitching, uncertain, unhappy. She wants to do what Francis wants, and he wants two things – to be wanted, and also for this not to happen – and he can’t help her and she can’t help him.

 

And now, when it is least helpful, most likely to harm, the pack sense opens up an inch between them all, given new life by their shared, hot obsession.

 

Now Francis can hear it. Feel it.

 

Can see himself how Sir John sees him. Can feel each nuance of distaste and Christian piety admixed with a deep-buried lust that would never have chosen this method for slaking but since it must be… Hypocrisy running, twisting through it all like the writing on a stick of Blackpool rock.

 

Sir John has stripped naked, Francis has done the same, does not remember doing so.

 

He is so _hot,_ and he _needs._  


Shelagh needs. It is her need, all her, he is only the helpless, hopeless conduit.

 

This is not the first time, and unless either or both of them die it will not be the last. Francis has never particularly liked this – like being bled during a fever, it is necessary and it is bearable - but he has never hated it till this voyage.

 

But then he’s never hated the ice before. Not until this now.

 

Ezekiel is butting up to Shelagh’s side, panting, eager. And she – Francis can feel her wonder, her confused sad hurt that there is only one wolf here, only one suitor.

 

Shelagh is a survivor, above all else. Shelagh needs this to work. Shelagh needs the pack.

 

So does Francis.

 

And Francis needs her to be happy. Cannot bear to feel her fight through her own ambiguity and his resistance any longer, when she is already as desperate as her physiology can make her.

 

Jopson had put an oilcloth cover on Francis’ bunk, earlier. Francis goes through the door from the great cabin and moves to it now, bending, belly down, and drops his trousers.

 

He hears a grunt from Sir John; approval. Hears the creak of the floorboards as Sir John follows him. Francis braces his feet as best he can, wool socks on a varnished floor.

 

If you keep your head down, neck bent, spine curved, it goes easier. He knows that by now.

 

Ezekiel launches his weight onto Shelagh, pushing her down, mounting.

 

Sir John echoes his motion, and gasps.

 

There is blood in Francis’ mouth, his tooth gone through his lip. Pain there, pain elsewhere; Sir John has the grease pot to hand, but can’t have remembered to use it, driven as he will be by Ezekiel’s growing, obsessive need.

 

However much whisky he got down, before this started, it wasn’t enough.

 

Shelagh growls, sudden, concerned, and Ezekiel bites her scruff – Francis can feel it as if against his own skin – and it is dangerous, now, in here, and things may go wrong beyond even what he has dreaded.

 

 _It will be better, this time_ , Francis tells her. _Go on. Let him._

 

And she does. And she takes them both with her.

 

-

 

“A noise of shouting?” Jopson lifts the bowl of water, readies the razor on the strop. “That was one of the other wolves, Captain. Got loose from Erebus, made his way over before anyone could stop him. His officer came after him, wrestled him back. No harm done although the officer was lucky not to lose a finger to the cold, or his nose, as I hear – no time to put on his proper outdoor slops, not at it was.”

 

“Oh, I see.” Francis had thought the sounds of commotion, of thumping, sometime in the last forty-eight hours, might have been his dreams. He shifts on his bunk without thinking and then winces. For a moment he breathes through the pain, then speaks again.

 

“Does Sir John know about this?”

 

“That it happened? Yes sir.” Leaning in, Jopson begins to remove two days of stubble from Francis’ chin. “But not who it was. He didn’t ask, anyway, or so I’m told.”

 

Francis nods. That at least is as it should be. Technically the wolf has led his brother to mutiny, defying a direct order to stay away and threatening the chain of command into the bargain, but no one would fairly judge it so and best it is all forgotten, by all of them, and as quickly as possible.

 

Although Francis cannot quite help wondering, a little, who that wolf, that officer was.

 

Anything to keep his mind from recalling all the rest of it again: Sir John, his uncareful treatment, his disgust coming through the pack sense even as he thrust and climaxed again and again, chained to the rhythm of the wolves rutting on the floor.

 

Once, and once only, Francis had tried to open his mind more fully, to take this moment to link them more closely, create some of that shared understanding which between a mated pair of wolves and their brothers could be the turning of fortune’s tide. With such a bond he could have spoken to Sir John of caution, of danger, of the necessary path to survival.

 

But Sir John had recoiled, horrified. Seemingly assuming it to be a mistake, a kind of emotional incontinence, he had reassured Francis about it soon afterwards – in a blessed lull, with a moment to take water and eat some of the sugar biscuits Jopson, wonderful Jopson, had apparently saved against this day and laid out in the cabin within easy reach.

 

“I accept that it must be hard, when this is required of you, to recall that you are an Englishman,” Sir John said, in a generous tone, all whilst sitting on the floor and wiping spunk from his torso with a flannel.

 

Francis had stared at him, and wished he could not tell that in ‘Englishness’ Sir John intended to wrap up all Christian virtues, disinclination to being a catamite (sodomy, being conquest, occupying a slightly different sphere) and a collection of other traits of ‘civilisation’.

 

“I am an Irishman, Sir John.”

 

“Well, well, British then.” Sir John waved his hand, dismissing any piddling matters of nomenclature. “I wish you to know I understand, and that I shall think none the less of you for this.”

 

“You are too kind, sir.”

 

“Oh dear, look at them.” Sir John had tilted his head at where Ezekiel was once more on his feet, nosing around Shelagh’s haunches. “Back to it, I think.”

 

Now, with the fogs of Shelagh’s heat long gone, with proper food in his belly, with his feet washed and his face shaved and feeling halfway to comfort, give or take the various soreness across his body, Francis finds the anger creeping to such a pitch that he cannot see why he didn’t strike the man at the time.

 

There is a whine, at the level of his knee; Shelagh butts her head against his thigh, and then leaps up onto the bunk, settling in alongside him.

 

He buries his hands, and then his face, in her long white fur. She smells like Ezekiel, still; no one has washed her, and she is too loath to leave him to go and roll in the snow.

 

 _It will be better, next time_ , she tells him. And then, after a pause: _It is stupid that it has to be Ezekiel._

 

That’s the nearest she’ll come to apology, to her own regrets, and he hates that he has given her even that. No wolf should ever be made to feel that way.

 

Hidden in her warmth, he lets himself open his mouth, and silently scream.

 

-

 

The next week when the usual time for the command meeting arrives, Francis is still walking not quite as he would like, and he sends apologies excusing himself the trek over the ice between the ships.

 

It is just the one, after all, and he has every reason for caution.

 

Polite acknowledgement and expressions of concern and good wishes are conveyed back in the hands of a shivering crewman.

 

The week after, Francis gets so far as to start to think on calling for his slops before he pauses, sitting in the great cabin and staring off into space. He can imagine them all in the cabin on Erebus that is the mirror to this (though Sir John commandeers it as his own, rather than the more democratized space Francis has made of it), and he can imagine Sir John and Fitzjames and Gore, and Ezekiel and Horatio and Aeneas, and all of them knowing what has happened to him, and indeed to his sister.

 

 _Of course_ , Shelagh says, confused, turning up ready to have the ice boots placed on her three good feet. The malformed limb was amputated at her elbow, some years ago now, but she moves as fast as any creature on the ground despite it. Most of the time both of them forget that it could ever have been otherwise. _Of course they know what happened. The Pack must know. That is how we make Pack._

 

He’s tried and failed, before, to explain to her about how Englishmen are about buggery. The problem is that she attempts to understand using logic and sense, which Francis knows from his youth is no way at all to conceptualise Christian morality as it is practiced.

 

 _We’ll go_ , he reassures her. _We’ll go and you can take what is your due. But no more sodding dinner parties._

 

“I’ll not make any more small talk with those fools,” he adds, aloud, speaking it to make it even clearer to himself.

 

As the next few weeks pass, and he keeps more and more to himself, he does not know what Sir John makes of it. Despite everything, despite all they put themselves through, the pack sense between them is still as dead as the landscape.  

 

But what would there be to say? Except that the light is returning, and with it something that passes for warmth, half a year a gone, and they have got nowhere at all.

 

-

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which nothing improves, but author promises she is on the road to a happy ending *g*

_April 1847_

 

It is generally considered, Francis knows, that the coming of spring is the coming of hope.

 

And even for him, indeed, once Shelagh’s heat is past, he celebrates the rest of the season as the time when it is the longest distance from that event coming around again.

 

The spring of 1847 is finally settled upon the Arctic circle, hours upon hours of daylight and the temperature at a place where an uncovered nose is not instantly a medical emergency.

 

And from what little Francis can tell of the pack sense aboard Terror, the men are hopeful. They betray no suggestion of being aware of the difficulties he is having with his commander, or his difficulties reading them - although of course part of the symptom of those problems is that Francis cannot be sure he is not missing something.

 

He’s not aware of their treatment of him having changed, either. Most of the men have served on naval ships before, enough to have known a mating was coming both last year and now, and he supposes that if that were to have lowered their opinion of him it had already happened.

 

Amongst the officers, there is perhaps a greater ambiguity. They will have been through the fog of the heat with their brothers, even drugged, even at a distance. And if their brothers feel cheated of what should have been, then Little, Hodgson and Irving – to say nothing of those on the Erebus - must wrangle that into their own feelings on the matter.

 

Shelagh is most concerned about Pisces, Lt Irving’s brother. And Francis has heard Irving speak, on morality and on ‘dirtiness’, and can imagine why.

 

So when the call comes to assemble the spring’s lead parties (the message couriered over to Francis ‘hoping the indisposition which keeps you from us is swiftly mending’), Francis selects Lt Hodgson, and Leo, for the Terror’s team.

 

A small ceremony is to be convened to wish the parties on their way; for this Francis bestirs himself. If the men have noticed nothing amiss thus far, then they will certainly note his absence from such a farewell, and he will not do anything more to jeopardise their morale.

 

He will not be like Sir John, though, nor like that fool Fitzjames. He will not offer platitudes or talk of conquest, he will not be hearty. He will not behave as though this were some fine storybook adventure.

 

The party from Erebus, heading west, is to be led by Lt Gore, with his brother Aeneas. Shelagh likes both well enough, and though Francis places himself standing a little apart from the men and the other officers, she pads forwards on the snow that is as white as her fur, and noses at both Aeneas and Leo, scenting them, pleasing them with her attention.

 

There has been a heat and a mating, and there should be cubs coming. The wolves know this, and are all the more ready to seek whatever their female needs.

 

Francis has examined Shelagh, feeling at her belly and her teats, and knows what she has not yet accepted; despite all their efforts, just as in ’46, this mating was sterile.

 

Ezekiel has never sired, that Francis knows of. But when humans come to judge wolves they extend the same prejudices as they do their own kind; this will be called Shelagh’s fault.

 

Despite the lack of what would have undoubtedly been a great catalyst for the pack sense, Shelagh should still – as lead female – be able to hear Leo and Aeneas, and their brothers, even for hundreds of miles, keeping Francis apprised of their progress and safety.

 

 _But when did this go right, so far?_ Francis asks her, not ungently.

 

 _It will be better_ , she pushes back, but it is weary. Even her optimism is not what it was a year ago.

 

“Travel well,” Francis tells the crews simply, when Sir John invites him to speak. And tries to push, through what pack sense that he can feel, the level of his care, of his concern for them, of his trust that they will do their best.

 

No answer returns to him.

 

Then Horatio is making a fuss, of a sudden, which is unlike him, and then, possibly to cover this, possibly just because he knows how much it will annoy Francis, Fitzjames sets up three cheers.

 

And off the men go, into all vast, white nothing.

 

“One of those teams will find us our way out and to glory,” Fitzjames states, the eager flush still in his cheeks. He has come over to where Francis is standing and spoken this foolishness before Francis has had a chance to disappear back to his ship.

 

“Certainly, if you believe you can make it so by saying so.” Francis is cold and not inclined to nonsense.

 

Fitzjames sighs. Nearby, Horatio and Shelagh are circling each other in the snow, red and white, something poised between play and teeth, uncertainly balanced. “And are you well, at last? That is to say.” The man clears his throat, closes his eyes for a moment. “I can feel that… I know that, in the spring…”

 

“You know nothing whatsoever about what happened in the spring,” Francis hisses at him, and turns on his heel, and walks away.

 

-

 

_“For it is the month of May, for it is the month of May!”_

Thomas Honey the carpenter is singing as he undertakes some repair near the great cabin, and Francis is taken in his mind to a green place, somewhere with buttercups flowering, rivers running, hay to be made and blossom in the trees. Somewhere like Ireland the way Ireland is in story and song, and nothing of how it was growing up in his home town.

 

He would give a great deal, right now, to see a green thing grow.

 

Despite his failure at the send-off, he has reason to believe that over the past weeks he has been able to pick up some of what the lead parties are encountering. That said, most of what he catches is a vague, alien sense of too-cold and too-tired, and he has plenty of that on his own account to get caught up in have echo back to him. It may all be nothing but delusion.

 

But most certainly those men – his men - are out in the wilderness when he is tucked up in his cabin or hearing yet another report on their shifting in the ice about which he can do absolutely nothing. And if he is to be of any use to the men, when the long, cold march he is starting to imagine comes, likely he will need this pack sense, this damned connection that he and his sister should be centre of.

 

Lying in that bunk, sleepless unless he manages to drink enough to soothe himself, which is getting harder and harder to do, he thinks on Sir John and on his own history. Neither of them were the first choice for this expedition, that much is well enough known, and also apparent is that it must have been an Admiralty man of singularly low comprehension who approved their placement on this one together.

 

Their relationship has never been easy, never from the first – might not have been expected to be so, for they are of different worlds. Their meetings in Van Diemen’s land during the Ross expedition might have been a chance for greater mutual knowledge, greater cordiality, but then there also had been Sophia Cracroft.

  
Francis Crozier, Irishman, brother to a wolfsister, had not been anywhere in her uncle’s plans for her.

 

Sophia seems like a distant dream, now, one Francis can scarcely conjure even when the mood takes him and he cannot help but reach for himself under the covers. Women do fade, when you are out at sea, he knows that as have generations of sailors before him.

 

If she could bond to a wolf, now. Now that would be a thing. If he and she could share that between them…

 

But society would be moderately less likely to tolerate a wolf with a sister than Francis as the second husband of Queen Victoria, so no point in pursuing the thought.

 

He had thought himself something of a confirmed bachelor, at his age. In his experience women lacked quick minds and made dull company – or at least those who he had had a chance to mingle with, which was admittedly few. Sophia, though, she had been delightful from the first, and suddenly there had been vistas of a life he’d never dreamed.

 

Shelagh had not objected to his preference. She had also not found it quite ideal – but then to her way of thinking, Francis’ life mate should be the bonded of her own.

  
Francis had given up all attempts to explain why that could not be so, and had merely assured her she would get used to it.

 

For a strange, brief period, he had been the more optimistic of the two of them.

 

If by some miracle they make it home, he thinks - if he and Sir John can mend all that is broken between them and fix this mess - he will be knighted for sure, and he will ask Sophia again, and next time…

 

He is in just such a reverie one day, although on deck rather than abed, when he becomes suddenly aware of Shelagh tensing at his side, hackles prickling up.

 

 _Putty clay soil in the rain_ , she informs him, which is to say Ezekiel. _On my ship._

 

Alarmed, Francis descends to find Sir John awaiting him.

 

Sir John is smiling. If he is thinking at all of the last time he and Francis were alone in this cabin with their wolves, he gives no sign of it.

 

“Francis!” he says, beaming. “I’ve come to repair our bonds.”

 

-

 

 _He knows_ , Shelagh says, triumphantly. _He is going to make it better!_ She almost scurries round the table to greet Ezekiel, smoothing the way like the most experienced of diplomats.

 

Francis sits. The uncurling of hope in him is an aching process, like the returning of blood to a frostbitten limb.

 

If Sir John has truly understood the parlous state of the pack sense! If Sir John is willing to spend time, with Francis, to repair it, then all might yet be well. When they can be open to each other, sharing thoughts and impressions, combining their expertise and experience of surviving this place – and they both have, they both have done it, it is not impossible – then this whole mission just might have a chance.

 

Sir John grins like a wolf would.

 

“I’d like us to be friends again.”

 

Not the way Francis would have put it, but perhaps…

 

“You never lost my friendship,” he offers, hesitant.

 

“Well, that may be true, but I’ve certainly lost your company. And I’m not the only one to notice. You’ve succeeded in avoiding Erebus most of the winter.”

 

Francis licks his lips. Sir John, of all people, should know why that has happened. But perhaps that is how Sir John wishes to get them past the events of the heat – by pretending that they did not occur. Wilful ignorance would, for this expedition, be only par for the course.

 

“I’m peevish off my own ship, as is Shelagh,” he offers, keeping his tone light. “We leave it and hear disaster knocking at its door before we’re ten steps away.”

 

Sir John raises his eyebrows: “Would it help if I said that I made a mistake?”

 

“You misunderstand me, Sir John. I only meant to explain why I brood.” To explain what should, between first and second in command, and after two years and two matings together, never need to be put into words.

 

That risen hope is starting once more to stifle, and paining him all over again as it suffocates.

 

“Summer is coming, Francis. Surely you can slip your brooding now?”

 

“Summer is here in name only, Sir John.” As he tries to make this clear, Francis pushes again at where the bond should be between them, with all his fear, all his knowledge of what the weather signs portend. But perhaps that is like too much weight on a half-broken bridge, collapsing what is left; Sir John makes no sign of having heard him at all.

 

“Signs of a cold May,” Sir John reassures him.

 

“Signs that nature does not give a damn about our plans!”

 

Shelagh trots over to him, pushes up against his leg. _Try. Try._ Ezekiel, already half dozing on the edge of her blanket pile, shows no such interest.

 

“Is nature’s author nowhere in your tally?” Sir John asks, with a completely straight face.

 

Francis cannot speak. The arrogance of the man!

 

If Francis himself believed in God he would fall on his belly and scream. Not think of Him as some genial tour operator, fixing matters up. That God would want them to succeed, but be untroubled by the deaths of David Young, John Torrington, William Brain and John Hartnell, as long as Sir John lived, for surely God values men by rank!

 

Shelagh whines, distressed, and Ezekiel raises his head and makes a lazy huff at her, displeased. He angles his neck, demanding grooming, and Francis can feel in every muscle of his own body her straining fight not to bite at him.

 

Both men, for a long moment, study the wolves. If Ezekiel and Sir John are conversing, Francis cannot hear it.

 

However it happens, Ezekiel flops back down again, as if he’s too bored to follow up on his demand. Shelagh sits down on Francis’ feet.

  
When Sir John speaks next, it is wry, with a bitterness Francis has not heard before from him.

 

“What a disappointment I must be to you.”

 

If the bond were open between them, Francis would not be able to lie, to dissimulate. If the bond were open, though, it would not be the truth.

 

“I will always come to you, I serve at your command.” Next spring, he is increasingly sure, they will still be not one inch further than where they are now. Next spring, this must all happen again.

 

 _Maybe this time it will be better_ , he hears himself think as if on reflex – Shelagh nudges close to his calf, whining – and he closes his eyes for a moment, despairing.

 

“Very well,” is all Sir John has to say to that, before he leaves, and Francis is alone with all his blank desperation, in the silence.

 

-

 

Something is wrong with Lt Gore’s lead party.

 

Not the usual wrongness of pointless and painful endeavour in the wrong direction; something worse.

 

Francis cannot be certain of it, but Shelagh is restless too, and though she cannot hear anything from Aeneas of any detail, she seems at times overwhelmed by distress.

 

Repeatedly, he finds himself on deck, without sometimes quite meaning to be there. As if the loss of the wooden walls could make the pack sense come through clearer, or make him of more use in responding to it.

 

There is a storm to the west. Lightning striking along the horizon. It troubles him.

 

Thomas Blanky, being merely a petty officer, has no brother of his own, but he knows Francis and Shelagh of old, and hears them well enough to know when to materialise at Francis’ elbow, ready to talk.

 

Shelagh shoulders against him in welcome. Francis fills his pipe.

 

They speak of the past a while, and chuckle. On the horizon, the storm rages still, and they both watch it, and consider where it is, and where Gore’s party ought to be, and do not need to discuss that they are doing so.

 

“You’ve journeyed like this before, Thomas,” Francis asks, after a while. “You know how it ought to feel, for the men. Is the pack sense of this expedition as poor as I feel it to be from my end?”

 

Thomas clucks, amused. “It’ll yet come. You figured it out with Ross, with Parry. I’ve heard tell of how you saved this very ship, in the south, sailing her between her partner and the iceberg set to smash her, all through the pack and your sister.”

 

“That was different.”

 

“Aye. You trusted Ross, and you trusted Parry.”

 

Francis closes his eyes for a moment. “Those thoughts, now. Can you in fact hear them?” He inclines his head towards Shelagh. “Or is it only because you know us both as you do?”

 

Thomas doesn’t answer – perhaps he can’t tell which is true himself. Carefully, awaiting confirmation of her permission, he puts his hand to Shelagh’s scruff.

 

She allows a scratch, huffing happily, and then moves away. She is troubled too by the horizon. At intervals, she puts her good front paw up on the side, whines.

 

“Lt Hodgson and his men came back, at least,” Thomas says.

 

“That is true.” Francis frowns. He had been delayed, going to hear from them – had already known, from Leo, that they had no great news to impart. They had halted at Erebus first, to make their report, and for men half frozen even the extra yards between the ships would have been too much to ask, despite them more properly being Terror men.

 

Fitzjames, and Horatio, had been their receiving party. And with their coming the agitation, hunger and guilt that Hodgson via Leo had been sending Francis’ way had eased, soothed. It is frustratingly unaccountable; Francis cannot think of anyone less likely to be soothing than Fitzjames.

 

Shelagh catches his mind, and shares once again her own thoughts about Horatio, which are as opaque to Francis as ever they have been, a medley of scent-names and very lupine concerns that he cannot read.

 

Sir John has been no use to him, but could he open Fitzjames’ mind?

 

The man’s a fool, no doubt, but has shown no sign of operating under any more delusion than the average English colonial. He has never claimed any particular favour with God to give him immunity from the need for common reason.

 

Perhaps Francis could… if, perhaps…

 

Francis stops, abruptly winded, gasping.

 

His pipe drops over the edge of the ship, somewhere into the snow, lost.

 

Shelagh is rearing up against the side now, howling hard and deep and inconsolable.

 

“What is it, Francis? _Francis?_ ” Thomas, shaking him, trying to help him up – when did he fall, when he become curled on the deck?

 

“Aeneas,” Francis manages to say. He is panting, like he’s been running for his very life. “Aeneas is dead. Graham too, I suspect.”

 

Thomas lets out his own cry of frustration, turning instinctively as Shelagh has, to look out over those miles of ice, to where it is all happening, somewhere to the west.

 

There is nothing they can do.

 

There is nothing Francis can do, no way to aid this pack he just enough a part of to know that they suffer, and that he has failed them.

 

Nothing to do but wait.

 

“Dear Christ,” he says, rising with the support of Thomas’ arm. “I need a drink.”

 

-

 

Drink and wait. Wait and drink.

 

Nearly three weeks of it.

 

Francis notes in writing his daily Captain’s log that it has become June. Half the year gone.

 

To no one but Thomas does he impart his knowledge of the state of things. If he is right then it will come out soon enough, but if he is wrong – perhaps by some miracle he is wrong – then no point in spreading his own despair further than himself. He can conceal it, as he has always done.

 

Fitzjames gives him odd looks in command meetings, but then the man always has.

 

If another month passes and there is no sign of the party at all, that will be Francis’ marker. Then he will speak.

 

But it is only June 6th when the men who do return are spotted, and then the worst of it is known to all, and in a series of events so fast and terrible that Francis can scarce comprehend them.

 

Aeneas died fighting some great creature, which then took Gore, who is presumed dead, and in the melee around that an Esquimaux man who by some tragic happenstance stood nearby was gravely wounded, and so here is also a woman – his daughter, it seems – and her anguish rings louder in Francis’ head than he can bear or understand, as her father slips away from under her hands.

 

Since that second death Shelagh has been low, dismal, and now she is afraid, hackles up, agitated even though all immediate threat would appear to be past. And through her the other wolves, every other on both the ships, mourning their loss and frightened enough to set the officers they are bonded to half mad, unless Francis can control this.

 

Bonding wolves is not a known practice in the native peoples of the far North, but the woman had not blinked so see so many on entering the ship, even as far as Shelagh and Horatio and Dr Stanley’s brother Culloden being in the sick bay – not that the last two stayed long. Perhaps it was only the intensity of her grief, removing all other concerns, but perhaps not.

 

She knows more than she is saying of what truly happened out on the ice, of that much Francis feels sure. He can see it, almost, the shape of something in her mind that she will not approach.

 

Something that she fears is something that they too ought to fear, Francis suspects.

 

But, “These people are not our concern,” is Sir John’s characteristically mutton-headed judgment.

 

Horatio whines, and Francis looks with surprise to see the unimpressed expression on Fitzjames’ face just before the man manages to hide it. Horatio goes to his brother’s side, gently headbutting his flank, and Francis can feel more clearly than he’d prefer the sincerity of Fitzjames’ sorrow, for Gore, for Aeneas and even for this foreign man.

 

And that for all that has been lost, no leads, no hope at all, has been found.

 

Back on Terror, the woman will disclose little more of use to Francis. She will not look at Shelagh, seems distressed, now, to have her in the room, and so Francis requests his sister to wait in the orlop. Despite this, his sense of the woman is clearer than it ought to be, more like it would be to a member of another pack than a simply random individual encountered far from home.

 

This woman thinks that Francis and his men are dangerous and foolish and that unless they leave this place they will all perish. That much she shares in her thoughts and her speech and every movement of her facial expressions.

 

Francis is inclined to agree with her.

 

Gathering determination is like putting weight on a broken leg, but he will try. Once more, he will try.

 

-

 

“I apologise for the timing of this request, but its virtue is in its speed.”

 

It is slightly easier to address Sir John in Sir John’s own great cabin on Erebus, where nothing terrible has yet happened between them.

  
Slightly.

 

Ezekiel is curled up on a blanket, the china bowl near him, half full of the familiar reddish slops that make the canned tomato beef stew they’ve carried thousands of miles north with them. When Shelagh goes to investigate he does not even snap at her, but no sooner has she smelt it than she turns away.

 

Francis explains his plan: the small would-be rescue party, perhaps eight or ten men, setting out now, making for the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company, reaching them by the start of winter, ready to set out again come next spring and rescue them all.

 

Sir John is like Shelagh at the food: nose wrinkled, immediately dismissive.

 

“I do not grant the wish.”

 

“At least tell me you understand why I am asking it?”

 

One more time, with a hopeless, familiar effort, Francis tries to open his mind to the other man. Tries to share his own thoughts and fears and knowledge, and tries to take some back in return.

 

Sir John’s lip curls.

 

“You are asking it because you are man who is happiest with a glass of knock-me-down in one hand, and an alarm bell in the other.”

 

It hurts more than it should. After all, Francis was under no illusions that Sir John regarded him highly.

 

Some respect, though? He had thought he had that.

 

Shelagh has gone tense and bristling. Ezekiel rises; he is staggering slightly, and conscious of it, and angry.

 

“I’m suggesting it, Sir John, because if this cold continues and we find ourselves over-wintering again in this ice help must already be on its way come spring if we are to survive!”

 

Ezekiel gets himself in front of Shelagh, menacing her with his extra height, trying to push her off balance on the side with the malformed paw, and Sir John strides towards Francis so that they too are nose to nose.

 

“I will not allow it, Francis. What signal will that send to the men?”

 

“It’s not the men I’m concerned about signalling! No one knows where we are.”

 

“None of which would matter, if your sister and yourself could hold together a pack sense in the manner which I was assured you were capable. And your prediction last year about the terrifying winter we’d spend in the ice, may I remind you, did not come true.”

 

“Not to the degree she and I feared but that will change, come winter, should there again be no thaw. It is a Captain’s duty, after all, to mind for the worst case, not for the one he hopes for.”

 

“Oh! Now I must hear you instruct me in a Captain’s duties?”

 

“It is only eight men, Sir John, and there is just enough time.”

 

“I have lost six men on this expedition to date. Six! And you ask me to risk more than doubling that number trekking over distant ground where you know I have lost men in years past. I will hear no more of this! I will not lose another man, Francis.”

 

“ _We_ may lose all our men. That is what my alarm is ringing now, Sir John.” Francis takes a shuddering breath, bites his lip.

 

“And I’m at a loss why yours is not. I have tried, I have tried again and again to open… to share with you… you know that I have done everything, permitted everything in my power to bring us to that point of understanding.”

 

Sir John is shaking his head. “You are the worst kind of second, Francis. You abuse your freedoms. You complain in the safety of speculation, you claim foresight in disasters that never happen and you’re weak in your vices, because your rank affords you privacy and deference and your sister and her God-given physiology cloak your basest desires in a veil of acceptability. You’ve made yourself miserable and distant and dirty, and hard to love, and you blame the world for it!”

 

Shelagh whines. She is abased by Ezekiel, cringing and then growling, half wanting Francis to let her go for his throat, half desperate for Francis to fix this, _please make it work._

 

“No one made you pick that wolf,” Sir John continues, spitting out the words. “No one made you have that broken creature who cannot ever be the alpha female that your role requires! But then they say the man receives the wolf he deserves. I’m not the sailor you are, Francis – never will be – but you will never be fit for command.”

 

Tears stand in Francis’ eyes. Hateful, hot, shaming.

 

His pain, Shelagh’s, his pain on her behalf, all looping round, the snake choking on its own tail. He will not let them fall. He will preserve that dignity and pretend that it means anything in the ruin of this.

 

“There are some things we were never meant to be to one another, Francis.” Sir John draws back his shoulders. He is a gifted sermonizer, and Francis recognises the sound of a concluding paragraph. “Friends, on my side. Pack brothers, on yours. So let us turn our energies back to the present moment and the task life has set before us. We should give that our best. There can be no argument between us there. Now you must excuse me, Graham’s eulogy deserves all of my time until tomorrow.”

 

 _Can I bite him, can I, can I, I must_ , Shelagh is saying, but Francis walks out, grabbing her scruff on the way, dragging her as he hasn’t since she was a cub. Ezekiel sniffs after her, dismissive, already slumping back down on the floor and wheezing.

 

In the hallway, surprise and alarm momentarily add to her distress.

 

Horatio. She bares her teeth at him, but he drops his head, submissive.

 

She lets him press his flank to hers.

 

Francis has this short tableau as a clue to know what he will see when he looks further along the corridor: Commander James Fucking Fitzjames, skulking, watching, _listening._

 

No doubt the man heard it all.

 

Through that damnably clear channel between them in the sense, Francis can feel Fitzjames’ pity. Thick and cloying, enough for him to choke on.

 

Francis pushes past, not waiting for more.

 

-

 

What he must do now is clear. There is nothing left for Francis to achieve here with the ships, with Sir John. He has failed the men in every possible way and is neither needed nor wanted.

 

All he can do is build them a road out of here.

 

Having given Thomas the order to ready the sledge for him, he sits down to try and compose his letter of resignation.

 

The whisky may not help his composition, but on the other hand it is doing very little for the ache in his heart either.

 

And then it comes.

 

That pain, again, that sudden terrible fear that he has known but a few times before.

 

_What in the seven hells?_

 

Shelagh is on her feet.

 

 _Putty clay soil in the rain,_ she tells him, and she is all alert, facing the direction of the hunting hide, from which Francis can now hear shouts, gunshots. _He is fighting. He is dying._

 

By the time Francis makes the site of the uproar, delayed and after the arrival of the closer Erebites, it is clear that Sir John has died too.

 

Horatio is circling on the blood-soaked snow, his distress as blatant as that of his brother, who is still calling uselessly down the hole in the ice as if some saviour might emerge from it.

 

Before Francis can think, Shelagh has reached them both. She bullies Horatio to the ground and sits heavily across him, holding him until he calms and stops fighting her.

 

 _Alpha_ , she tells him, and Francis, and loud enough that anyone else, man or wolf, with the capacity to hear would know it. _I am alpha now._

 

Only then does Francis truly understand what has happened to him.

 

He’s never wanted anything in life so little as he wants this.

 

-

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note I've now added the 'Alcoholism' tag, but also the 'Alcohol withdrawal' tag. Oh Francis...

_September 1847_

 

In real terms they have achieved nothing in the past twelve months but converting supplies into shit, ice into piss. It is more dark again, now, than light. Creeping away from the point of the summer solstice in June, the sun is leaving them again. Moving ever onwards on its circuit, whilst they are stuck, still.

 

“Elegant, but untrue,” Fitzjames counters when Francis voices this. His long, pale fingers are drawing lines on the table before them, dancing on the charts, “for it is we, or rather this planet, that move in relation to the sun, and it that is fixed forever in the endless void of space.”

 

“Thank you, James _”_ , Francis had says dryly, after a pause, and pours himself another.

 

The newest and most pressing annoyance about Commander – now Captain – James Fitzjames is that he is not, in fact, the incompetent upper-class fool Francis always had him pegged for.

 

When Sir John was alive he was the ultimate overseer of Fitzjames’ actions and decisions, and now that this task falls to Francis he is surprised to find the man has a generally logical and pragmatic outlook, an instinct to manage men without bullying and a sharp mind hungry to add to an already impressive array of knowledge.

 

To make matters worse, Shelagh and Horatio have arrived at some sort of balance with each other, and more than that besides. She is always eager, now, to go to Erebus or have her new alpha male come to her. Francis suspects that Ezekiel may have been as much a problem between the two of them as Sir John, it seems now, was between himself and Fitzjames.

 

 _You’ve not been a cub this twenty years_ , Francis tells her all the same. _You do not need to play._

 

She doesn’t dignify this with an answer, just pushes back her hope that maybe, now, finally, the pack sense will crystallise for her. For both of them.

 

She is looking to the future. She isn’t recalling what Sir John said to Francis, before. What Fitzjames heard Sir John say.

_Never be fit for command_

 

Francis can hear that in his head, an echoing each and every time after the clink with which a glass is struck by the neck of a clumsily held whisky bottle. At least, for a while he can hear it. With enough clinks, enough swallows, everything else is eventually silenced.

 

Fitzjames watches this action, always, when he is present. He does neither of them the favour of pretending he cannot see.

 

The man was content to allow Sir John to be foolish, why does that charity not extend to Francis?

 

Once, Fitzjames always wore his hair pomaded, in waves either side of his face like a bloody poet. Now, like some of the men but unlike Francis – Francis is not letting himself go, let him be quite clear on that, he wears his uniform fully and daily – Fitzjames has allowed his hair to grow, and more often than not it is pulled back in a queue, as a sailor might have worn it in his grandfather’s day.

 

Should Francis notice this? There is precious little else to notice, after all. The shortening of the days, the lengthening of hair, the ever-decreasing variety of food; these are more markers here than the days of the week.

 

He has certainly noticed how Shelagh is with Horatio. The way that more and more they slump together in one companionable heap under the table when Francis and Fitzjames meet.

 

It is not unknown for the arrival or ‘promotion’ of a new alpha male to trigger a bitch into early heat.

 

And that cannot be allowed. It simply cannot.

 

Fitzjames has no very great opinion of him, despite his willingness to be agreeable – that much is entirely clear. But yet it is not so low that it could not be worsened.

 

And Francis finds that the idea of sinking lower in Fitzjames’ estimation is not pleasant.

 

The way he drinks might seem counterproductive to such a goal, but the more Francis drinks, the less he can feel the thrum of Shelagh’s blood.

 

On and on the light fades, and the days die ever earlier.

 

-

 

“Something metallic?” Fitzjames says, frowning, looking up at Francis in query.

 

It is their regular meeting in Terror’s great cabin, and at this moment they are both paying most of their attention to the wolves - have been for the past several minutes. Shelagh and Horatio have come to some kind of conclusion that they wish to put before this meeting of their brothers, but it is something not quite in lupine vocabulary, at least as either Francis or Fitzjames have grown used to understand it.

 

“The food in the metal cans is bad?” Francis thinks he is sweating, slightly, despite the cold. His head aches and his skin itches. Today and not for the first time he had resolved not to drink in the two hour duration of this weekly captains’ meeting, if only to demonstrate that - of course - he could do so.

 

If only his damn head hurt less – that is nothing of the alcohol, that is the cold, and when it no longer affects him he will not need to drink like this.

 

He is not his father.

 

“No, I think they say that the badness is metallic.” Fitzjames kneels on the floor – the muscles of his back curve like a Grecian statue, because of course they do - and takes Horatio’s red-brown head between his hands, staring into his eyes. “You don’t like the canned food, do you, old chap?”

 

“Shelagh will never touch it, I know that.”

 

“Whereas Ezekiel quite doted on the stuff, I believe.”

 

For a moment both Shelagh and Horatio make a highly interpretable communication of their opinion on Ezekiel’s general level of common sense. Francis chuckles, and Fitzjames catches his eye, smiling too.

 

“As for the others…” Francis pauses, frowning, considering. “The other wolves are, I assume, mostly on salt pork, salt beef. Given the high quality of the canned food, it was always intended to be favoured for officers and the highest ranking wolves only.”

 

“Quality!” Fitzjames makes a dismissive sound. “Half the stuff is spoiled, from the reports I read.”

 

Francis frowns a moment. Did he read that report? If he hadn’t slept so badly last night – this infernal headache – he would recall.

 

 _Metal poison, in the cans_ , Horatio says – Francis can barely breathe for a moment, because he hears it, hears it clear as if it had been Shelagh speaking.

 

“He says the poison is a metal, and is in the cans,” Fitzjames is saying; and yes he will be assuming that Francis did not hear, because the sense has never travelled completely between all four of them in this way.

  
That this is happening now shows that the risk of an early heat is greater than Francis had supposed, and no one ever accused him of being an optimist.

 

Francis can imagine it with horrible clarity. Himself and Fitzjames, perhaps in this very room, forced through the motions in all their indignity, and the way Fitzjames would look at him, afterwards…

 

_Never be fit for command._

 

It wouldn’t matter what he drank, or whether, after that. Sir John had made it very clear: men who do what Francis does are not worthy of anything.

 

“Pardon me a moment, James,” he says now, and gets up, stumbling only a very little. “I must just fetch something.”

 

In his bunk, the glass he left half-done when Fitzjames arrived is waiting ready. It burns on the way down, cleansing fire.

 

He is still wiping his mouth with the back of his hand when he returns to the great cabin; he sees Fitzjames seeing it, sees the light leaving his eyes.

 

“We must redouble our efforts to trap fresh meat,” Francis says, tapping his fingers on the table. “I don’t understand what Shelagh and Horatio mean, exactly, but in any case we need those cans preserved as long as possible. Barrow himself told me those cans were the best thing in the world any man could be eating for his health, but then he’s not here now, is he?”

 

Fitzjames clears his throat, and writes a note in the log.

 

They both know how unlikely it is, with all the will in the world, that there will be game here, at least any that any of them are capable to catch.

 

Out here, the only prey is them.

 

-

 

It is on the day that the light dies for the year that more men are lost.

 

The boy Evans will never have a headstone with this day engraved on it. No one will read _29 th November 1847_, and calculate back from the boy’s birthday and mourn that he was too young, oh far too young, to be taken so.

 

And if there were any justice in this world, such a headstone would record that his death was Francis’ fault.

 

He should not have let Evans go out into the dark with him. He did not do it for the sake of the boy, but for himself. To have someone who was scared turn to him seeking safety, comfort… It has been so very long since Francis was needed.

 

Despite her missing leg, Shelagh moves more quickly over snow and ice than Francis ever could, but she was not fast enough to save the boy either.

 

She knows his sorrow now perhaps more deeply than he will allow himself. Since it happened she has not been more than an inch from his side, pressing to his leg and now, as he sits in Fitzjames’ cabin, to his flank, resting her great head on his lap.

 

His melancholia has never made sense to her, not really. And she has never known another human as she knows him; perhaps she has come to see it as normal.

 

But she is aware, now, how close he is sailing into the wind. She is aware, and she is afraid, and only with another drink can he make it fade away, the awful pain of causing distress to the one closest to him in all the world.

 

Dulling their link must hurt her too. Deep down he knows that, keeps it corralled in a special dark festering bruise, but providing he drinks, it too is not something he must feel.

 

Fitzjames, as ever, is attempting analysis:

 

“Are you saying that a bear staged a misdirection?”

 

Francis stares into his glass. The amber fluid sparkles, beautiful in the light.

 

Horatio shifts on the floor – he has been lying close to Shelagh, and now he lets his head rest for one instant on Francis’ foot, and all too probably he can hear what Francis is not saying, not out loud: _I only took him with me because he was scared. Because I was scared._

 

The whisky has stopped tasting of anything in particular. It is like water, now and seems to have as little effect.

 

Fitzjames clears his throat.

 

“With all you’re shouldering perhaps you should... Perhaps you should curb that, for now.”

 

So polite! As though Francis could not hear the true disgust behind the words, wolf bonds or no wolf bonds.

 

And Fitzjames is doubly a fool, not to know what Francis is saving them both from by doing this. For all Fitzjames’ book learning, he doesn’t have the experience to understand what they are facing here, in this place, with their wolves, never has.

 

“Don’t let it bother you,” Francis tells him, dismissive. “It’s not as if we’re going anywhere, is it?”

 

Except of course, Fitzjames has not the sense to let that be that:

 

“You’re in command.”

 

“Of what? You realise that the discovery of the passage is beyond us now?”

 

Fitzjames sets his face. “You don’t know that.”

 

We all have our vices, Francis supposes. Being a damnfool optimist who thinks that any goal can be realised, if wishing wills it so, may be reckoned a more minor fault than a fondness for drink, but not by him.

 

He points his finger at Fitzjames, without putting down his glass. “If the ships are still afloat come spring we will have to retreat, to open water and rescue. If our provisions take us that far we will already have done better than we might.”

 

The anger, the disgust on Fitzjames’ face… just the thought of this man also seeing him as he is when Shelagh’s needs consume him… that is enough to make Francis sip the drink again.

 

“Why are you here, Francis? You’ve never believed in this cause! No one was ordered to this. We volunteered, you volunteered.”

 

Francis takes another drink. Why not?

 

“I was in fact ordered.”

 

“By whom, not by the Admiralty. You were never Barrow’s choice.”

 

And to make the day worse than it already is, Francis finds himself speaking of Sophia. Only to learn that Fitzjames knows of it all, and from Sir John. Oh, Francis can picture them, discussing it. Sir John making it quite clear why no niece of his would ever grace Captain Crozier’s arm.

 

Fitzjames evidently concludes that Francis came along in order to sway Sir John’s receptiveness, were he to propose to Sophia Cracroft a third time. That Francis is the lapdog of a woman who has given him nothing in return.

 

Untrue on both counts, although he’ll not waste breath telling Fitzjames so. He and Sophia Cracroft are friends and have been lovers – she has given him many things a woman is not supposed to give, including the joy of her body and the freshness of her opinions. He had dreamed of a future with her, yes, had seen a kind of salvation in it – a version of his life that ended in a place like a storybook. But he has known for a long time that any story she has planned for her life takes a very different path.

 

He joined this expedition for love of her, in a way, and for love of his ship and for love of the sea and of this strange, cold place. And Shelagh loves the ice with all the passion of her ancestors; her white coat bespeaks the most northerly of bloodlines.

 

In that way it will suit them both to die here. More so than perhaps any of the others who will go with them.

 

That freezes him for a moment. It is the first time he has let himself know it. Looked clear down the path of his life and seen only one route, a decided ending, and that very near.

 

“Keep your pity,” is what he says to Fitzjames, in the end. “You’re going to need all the pity you have for what’s coming.”

 

-

 

“I’m not sending men out into a squall! Not tonight! They’re exhausted!” Francis looks around the room, the fearful, frostbitten faces. “We’re all exhausted.”

 

How absolutely true that is. Was already true, even before the grisly discovery this evening on the foredeck. Death after senseless death and now it appears that the creature does not even want to eat its victims, only to humiliate and despoil them in a way Francis would once have called uniquely human.

 

He feels as though he is only intermittently awake, and then whenever he is someone else has been lost, a fever dream that he cannot escape.

 

He will bring the Esquimaux woman back to the ship to be questioned again, because there must be some solution to this and he is sure she knows it. Such a creature could not roam this land without the native people’s having found some way to deal with it, placate it, avoid it, kill it – whatever is needed to save his men, Francis will do.

 

And yet already he can see for how many of his officers this is not an inquiry but an interrogation.

 

Fitzjames just now, his face as ugly as Francis has ever seen it, demanding that the parties be sent out to bring the woman tonight: _By most accounts this people are covetous, treacherous, cruel…_ Francis wanted to spit the taste of those words away from him.

 

“Gentlemen,” Francis says now, “do without me for a moment.” He slides into his cabin, already reaching for the bottle.

 

He can hear Fitzjames’ sigh through the closed door, still feel the echoes of the man’s hateful fear in his mind.

 

Perhaps with another glassful…

 

He comes awake, headachy and nauseous, to Shelagh tugging at his trouser leg. To the sound of shouting and a sudden awareness of the disruption in her sense, of distress so strong from Fitzjames than he can almost hear the man’s thoughts: _God, Dear God, mutiny…_

 

Shelagh can feel it all: the men, the fury, the chaos. She knows the scent of disobedience and she can send it to him now, and though his hands are trembling he fumbles for his pistol from its box.

 

And thank goodness he had the presence of mind to think of it, because only his shot into the air brings the great crowd of men under the canvas on the Terror’s deck to silence.

 

The wolves of the other officers patrol the floor with their teeth bared, nervous of their brothers’ safety.

 

Horatio has his hackles fully risen, and his back square to Fitzjames’ legs.

 

None of this is as it should be. The wolves are not, are never intended to be used in force.

 

The men should obey Francis because of the pack sense. Because he commands their love in the way a wolf alpha female does, love that is also fear, that is also respect, that is above all shared between them.

 

Only now does he see the woman on the deck – she was on her knees already when he arrived.

 

She looks at him and he can feel something dark and jagged from her, something else he does not want to feel. That he should not be feeling – the alcohol is still in him, he can hear the slurring of his voice as he addresses them.

 

The party who went for her – Hickey, Manson and Hartnell, and from Hartnell in particular the betrayal of his order hurts – claim they saw her ‘in communion’ with the bear. Nose to nose, if they are to be believed, which Francis is not particularly inclined to do.

 

If she has – or could have – some relationship to the creature of the kind he has with Shelagh, much could be explained. Or was it her father? A wolf who has lost their brother is a terrifying and terrible animal, how much more so something in this wasteland?

 

The distress he is feeling is not solely his own for the rest of the night, and does not help him assign punishment rationally, or to keep his temper.

 

And so for desertion, dereliction of duty, insubordination, brutality and disrespect, the men are lashed.

 

This is not how a pack should be.

 

This is what happens on ships where the pack has failed.

 

Bligh had men lashed.

 

Hours afterwards – it is probably hours, he is alone and in the dark, glass in hand, and he cannot be certain – some space of time afterwards, Jopson comes to him with the results of the poll of the Terror’s men. The poll to see whether there are enough of them willing to give up their long-held bonds to ship and friends, to the Captain who has led them thus far, and move to the steadier floors of the less ice-beleaguered Erebus.

 

It is nearly all of them.

 

 _All but ten_ , says Jopson, as though the words pain him to speak.

 

Francis does feel as though the man struck him. No, as though they reached into his chest and took a stab at his heart.

 

The men here are not his. Perhaps never have been. There is so little pack sense that they feel no loyalty at all.

 

He has entirely and utterly failed.

 

There is little point in doing anything any more in the pretence that he matters.

 

That he will ever be fit for anything.

 

He stops attending captains’ meetings, ice meetings, command meetings, the officers’ mess. Stops leaving his rooms more than one day in three.

 

He sits in the dark on the echoing, half-empty Terror. He cries. He despairs. He drinks. One is driving the other, somehow, but he does not know which.

 

-

 

The whiskey is running out.

 

The whiskey is running out and Shelagh has stopped speaking to him at all.

 

The whiskey is running out and he is not totally sure he could hear Shelagh even if he tried, or where she is, or how it has come to this.

 

This whiskey is running out and his ship is tilting, dying, slowly being crushed by the ice.

 

The whiskey is running out and if it does then he will have to think of any of the rest of it.

 

The whiskey is running out.

 

-

 

The woman looks for Shelagh at his side when she is brought to the great cabin. But Shelagh has been sleeping in Thomas’ rooms, not here with Francis of late, and seeing no sign the woman tilts her head, quizzical, pitying and yet not appearing surprised.

 

Francis wonders if she can sense what Shelagh told him, the last time she was in his mind; that he _stinks._ Shelagh did not say of what, not precisely, but her sense to him was clear and he can unpick it:

 

_Acid. Bile. Inflammation._

 

It is what he smells from himself when he is sick, in the mornings, which happens reliable as a ships bell unless he wakes and drinks in time to prevent it.

 

(The whiskey is running out)

 

So the hearing is convened; Francis, Thomas Blanky and Dr MacDonald, to speak the language, and Lt. Little as his second on Terror, and Dr Goodsir since he has appointed himself nursemaid, and Jopson because where would they be without Jopson?

 

Not with any great eagerness – with an air that pity drives this cooperation, as much as anything – the woman speaks of the bear. The Tuunbaaq. A spirit clothed as an animal, apparently. Well one might call a trellwolf so, being a reasoning creature that nonetheless walks on all fours.

 

So it is possible that she could be talking to it, as a man to a wolf, though she denies trying.

 

<<How do we kill Tuunbaaq?>> he asks her, feeling like a man in a dream, and she just stares at him, with a look that apparently is the same for every continent on the Earth: the look of disgust. Then she glances again the corner where Shelagh had used to keep her bedding, and back at him, the accusation clear on her face.

 

<<Wolves earn their place amongst us. Tuunbaaq is killing my men!>>> he points out, standing, and she just… breathes out. Slow. Like he might not be worth the air.

 

He turns to those in the room, to Dr MacDonald and Goodsir and Edward and Thomas. “Are we all agreed she is not co-operating?”

 

“Sir,” Goodsir protests. “In the month she’s been with us she hasn’t once mentioned leaving or made any attempt at escape.”

 

“Have you asked yourself why?” Thomas interjects. “She’s frightened of it as well.”

 

Fear. Well, Francis has become a man who rules by fear, it seems, even if through lack of any other option.

 

“Lieutenant Little,” he commands, “this woman is to be offered no protection on either ship. Thomas, you escort her off Terror. Let her back aboard only when she’s screaming for help! Perhaps she’ll speak up then!”

 

Thomas doesn’t even move, damn him. “No Francis, I will not.”

 

Francis rounds on her, shouts and knows that his stinking spit has landed on her face, but she scarcely blinks: “Help us stop it or you leave!”

 

<<And who is going to stop you?>> When she comes to life it is like a fire catching in tinder. <<You use the wind to carry you here. You use the forest to hide inside. You use all this and you don’t even want to be here! You don’t want to live. Look at you!>>

 

And she does look at him, a slow, considering gaze in which it Is entirely clear he doesn’t measure up.

 

<<Even if I could help, you don’t want it.>> She looks again at the cold corner where before there had been Shelagh’s blankets. <<You have rejected the friend of your own soul.>>

 

The pain and sickness rise in him, flooding his eyes, blocking his ears.

 

Thomas is speaking, now. “She asked you, Francis: Why do you want to die?”

 

Thomas, who speaks Inuktitut better than Francis does, would have heard and understood all of it. And his translation has the sound of words he would gladly say on his own account.

 

Francis steels himself, breathes.

 

And then Captain James Fucking Fitzjames, with the timing of only the most irritating man on Earth, bursts into Terror’s great cabin in his slops, all flushed from his walk over and his own sense of self-importance.

 

The woman looks to him at once, and to Horatio who has entered at his side, and then back to Francis. She gives a short, disdainful laugh.

 

<<You know what you have to do to save them all>> she tells Francis, like a teacher would a child. <<And you don’t do it>>

 

“Francis…” Fitzjames begins, utterly, stupidly oblivious to the fact that acts of necessary sodomy are being spoken of. That the woman Is reminding Francis that it is his place to bend over, and to be despised for it.

 

_Never be fit for command._

 

He raises his hand. It very nearly doesn’t shake as he stabs his finger at the man. “Don’t ever call me Francis again! You’ll call me what I’m due to be called!”

 

Horatio has been circling them both, looking for Shelagh, nosing at her corner and then to the door. She might be out in the corridor now, given the general commotion, but there is no one to let her in. At Francis’ shout though, he stiffens, fixing his gaze, watchful and tense.

 

Fitzjames, on the other hand, makes a great show of nonchalance. Of exhausted patience.

“Oh, what you are due, Francis? There hasn’t been a single meal, a single conversation that we’ve shared where you weren’t morbing on about what you’re due. Well, your luck has changed. No one has you in harness any longer. You are commanding this expedition entire. So, damn your eyes, what else do you require? Respect?”

 

He comes closer. His eyes are sparkling with anger and that cold, clear, familiar disgust.

 

“Well, earn it then. Or are you determined to be the worst kind of first as well?”

 

Francis hits him.

 

And then it is chaos. Thomas and Jopson dragging Francis back, and Edward with Crécy having to step in and block Horatio, Fitzjames on the floor, and the woman still kneeling, shaking her head at the pack of them.

 

Thomas has his hand on Francis’ shoulder, pushing him down, keeping him seated.

 

“You be careful now,” Thomas is muttering. Not ‘Captain’, not even ‘Francis’ from him. _You_. “Or you’ll end up like John Ross at Fury Beach.”

 

Francis remembers that story. He thinks he does, anyway. Dammit it’s been an hour, at least, since he drank anything – two hours perhaps.

 

(The whisky is running out)

 

The first thing will be to remedy that, and then it will come clearer, it will all come clearer if only this pounding in his head and in his heart will ease a moment.

“Everyone out!” he tells them. And at the first sign of protest, “Go smoke a pipe, Thomas. Go stare at the ice. I want a full report, in an hour. That’s an order!”

 

It will be cold outside, which is to say that there is a real chance Thomas will lose a toe, or maybe worse. At best it will be foul, cruel.

 

Ruling by fear is so easy, he is realising, at least in this world of horrors.

 

And that will teach the man to tell him what his fate is.

 

“Thomas…” says Fitzjames, a question in his voice.

 

And in that moment it all hangs. Thomas could tell Francis ‘no’, the second time in the past few minutes. Thomas could say: _this man is not fit, any longer, and I know of what I speak, and I obey you now Captain Fitzjames_ , and the whole room would swing to his side.

 

For a heartbeat, Francis only wishes the man would do it. End it.

 

But Thomas has been with them longer than anyone. Thomas would not do that to Shelagh.

 

Thomas calls him ‘Captain’ now. Thomas obeys.

 

Leaving Francis to the haranguing of Fitzjames, which seems like the worst way the day could be going, for all the few minutes before the screaming starts above them.

 

-

 

It is Hodgson and his men who save Thomas Blanky, in the final tally. They are the ones who choose to walk back from the relative safety of the icebergs to where the monster is attacking. The ones who load and aim and fire the cannon, and it is Fitzjames who goes to them and makes the aim true with every ounce of his expertise.

 

It was the wolves who broke the hatch open. The hatch some damn fool ordered sealed shut only days ago (and Francis may well have been that fool, it is in a hole in his memory, one that stinks of rotten grain). Shelagh, desperate, and Horatio, and Crécy and Pisces, all of them flinging their weight bodily on the joins until they cracked.

 

And Francis, who would have done anything in his power to save Thomas Blanky, did nothing at all.

 

_Anything?_

 

Francis feels every nerve in his body thrum. It is Shelagh, asking him.

Shelagh, coming up behind him on deck, her words in his head clear despite the wind.

 

Francis could cry to hear her. Barely dares to turn, in case she moves away.

 

Slowly, in an action she lets him know she is debating the wisdom of and yet cannot resist, she presses her head against his hip.

 

He feels the heat of her breath through all his layers, and there are tears in his eyes now and his heart aches like it is cracking open.

 

 _Anything_ , he promises _._ Carefully, he reaches down his hand, rubs at the back of her neck. _I will do anything._

 

 _You know what you have to do_ , she tells him. And where has Francis heard that before, today?

 

Perhaps he could not have given the last of the whisky away, though it killed him, unless it were to Thomas. Unless it were for her.

 

But for all his sins, he has them both, and the whisky is gone, now.

 

He stays at Thomas’ side during the operation and long while after, weeping. Pushing all he can of his concern and contrition through Shelagh to Thomas, half his tears for what has happened, half for the way it feels to have her at his side again, her mind tendrilling softly back into his own.

 

-

 

“Gentlemen,” he says, to the four who must see this.

 

Lt. Little. Dr Peddie. Thomas Jopson.

 

And, either of them like it or not, Captain James Fitzjames.

 

“I’m going to be unwell, gentlemen,” he says. No need to put it any plainer than that; they know what he means. “Quite unwell, in fact.”

 

For a long moment after he has finished speaking, none of them make any more response. He has been crying, couldn’t stop himself, and perhaps they are trying to give him his dignity – goodness knows there’s little enough of it in store for him when the withdrawal kicks in.

 

He closes his eyes, a vessel of pure self-loathing.

 

There’s a gentle pressure against his legs. The warmth of a wolf. But Shelagh is on his other side, curled mostly behind him.

 

It is Horatio, he sees. Horatio has risen and come to him.

 

Fitzjames says nothing himself. But he meets Francis’ confused gaze steadily, and then with a very slight tip of the head.

 

-


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this is going up about 12 hours later than planned - I do a medical on call, and last night there were many calls, alas. But it is twice as long as some chapters, which I hope compensates a bit *g*

_January 1848_

 

It will be a dull day in hell for him, when he finally gets there. This thought has been occupying Francis Crozier’s mind for some while now.

 

For he has known it all already! He has frozen and bled and been beaten and been used. He has been turned away by all those from whom he needed love, at one time or another.

 

And now he is on fire.

 

As he knew it would be – he saw his father, did he not, when the gin money ran out? – now even the smallest dignities of the body are not left to him. He shakes, he drools, he vomits and he shits, and none of it is under his control.

 

But like Odysseus who sailed into the underworld and returned, and perhaps scarcely more believably, this descent of his is ending.

 

For there comes a day, finally – or a night, Francis is beyond telling the bells of the watch and it is always dark outside – a period of wakefulness, say, which reverses the trend. Which is not quite as awful as that immediately before.

 

It lasts only a short while. But it is there and in the coming days – days that he knows, recognises, can count – it waxes, grows.

 

Again and again the faithful Jopson comes to him, equipped with towels wet from the cookstove and a smile from some unfathomable well of patience.

 

Francis believes that by this point he has offered Jopson everything a man could offer, and more, wild promises with no hope of delivery, if Jopson would only give him another moment to sip at the whisky glass.

 

He thinks he threatened to have good Doctor Peddie executed for mutiny – would have done it himself, had he had his pistol to hand.

 

But Odysseus’ men did not untie him from the mast, and his men have not abandoned him to himself either.

 

Shelagh would for certain have made them break their promises, had she been present, which is why for the past sixteen days she has been away on the Erebus, and all her food and water laced with laudanum, leaving Francis once more without the comfort of her voice.

 

 _Like heat_ , he had told her, _like that amount of wanting, and I will beg them, and I will hurt as you hurt for a mate, and more than that, because I will be dying. Unless they give me a little drink, every day, I will die. They must give me just enough, and it will always be less than I want. You must let them hurt me this way, it must happen._

 

She had suggested the sedation as the solution to this problem – _the thing the males are made to sleep with, so they do not come to the mating when I call them_

 

_Oh, you call them, do you?_

 

 _Of course I do._ She had been quite genuinely surprised. _I cannot help that. But the sleep water stops them. Except for_ evening rose crushed in heat. _He came to us, last time. They came to us. But no one let them in._

Francis had been so weary at that time, and with the prospect of so much misery before him, and failure behind, and with scarcely time to wonder, but her words nonetheless had struck him.

 

So it had been Horatio who had been the one that tried to break into the last mating? Horatio who had tried, and Fitzjames who had run after?

 

But Fitzjames would have had no choice but to follow; Horatio would have killed men that day to get to wherever Shelagh was.

 

Today is the seventeenth day of Francis’ journey through his own personal hell, and finally she is to be allowed back to him. He has stopped begging for alcohol with any seriousness now, stopped his threats and bribes; he is confident she will know that what Jopson and Peddie do to him – and do not let him do to himself - is a kindness.

 

He felt her waking this morning, as he always does, even through her sedation and his own torments. And today, today he let himself try and speak to her, a reward long awaited.

 

 _I shall miss evening rose crushed in heat, he is warm to sleep against_ , she had told him frankly. _He and his brother should come and live with us. He would not get ideas above himself, he is very sensible._

_Wolves can be more sensible than men, in that regard_ , Francis had answered. _And besides the men of Erebus need their Captain with them._

With this she had been prepared, grudgingly, to be content.

 

Now she makes the journey between the ships whilst doubling as a protective escort for a crewman with a message about food supplies; the crewman having to run, she tells Francis, rippling with wolf-laughter, to keep up with her.

 

And then she is in the cabin, fur wet and cold and snow, on his bunk, licking his face and oh, for the first time in over a year, he is glad, glad, glad to be alive.

 

-

 

Is it just the freshness of his mind, after all that time clouded with the whisky? Is that why the fragile pack sense comes clearer to him now than he thinks it did before?

 

Shelagh, nested now to her satisfaction on a new pile of Hudson Bay blankets in one end of his cabin – which is to say, occupying nearly all of it which is not his bunk – feeds him images, associations, glimpses – something being made ready. Something human that she doesn’t particularly care about (and neither do the other wolves) but can tell is making the men… happy?

 

“A party? To celebrate what, pray? Jopson, come here, have you heard about this?”

 

Jopson grins, materialising with a tray. “It’s for the first sunrise sir. First dawn of 1848. It is only days away now. And Captain Fitzjames is calling it a ‘Carnivale’.”

 

“I see.”

 

Of all the ideas Francis had imagined Fitzjames trying to enact during his absence from command, this… had not been one of them.

 

How lovely, he reflects bitterly, to know that he is recovering because he has energy enough, now, to fret about his position, and the loyalty of others, and whether or not his chance to earn respect is now completely behind him.

 

One interminable hour when he is just sickly enough not to wish to move an inch until he has had longer for digestion, Francis pushes out into the sense, wondering…

 

It is like stepping onto ice when you expected gravel – he slips, slides into it, sudden and too easy.

 

Horatio. Fitzjames. There they are, he finds them at once, out about a mile from the ships, busy about their preparations – Francis catches words, pictures, impressions of bustle, the scent of sailcloth too long stored, paint, the sound of laughter.

 

When he first feels the pull in reply he doesn’t recognise it.

 

_Francis?_

 

Impossible! He draws into himself at once, closing his mind even to Shelagh, and curls up into a ball in his bunk for good measure.

 

Then uncoils, cursing, rubbing his rebellious stomach, glad for a moment to think of no problem greater than his own physiology.

 

-

 

Fitzjames, Francis learns, has not been on Terror since Francis confined himself to quarters.

 

In times when his nightmares and hallucinations conformed in any way to plausible reality, Francis had imagined himself demoted. Back to midshipman. Turned before the mast and back to ordinary crew, no better than he ought to be. And Fitzjames taking command of the ships, and Fitzjames leading them to destruction – or sometimes to victory and the passage and glory, and both were ghastly.

 

But Fitzjames has not been on Terror, and from all Jopson, Peddie and Shelagh in their different ways can tell him, Fitzjames has not done anything whilst Francis was incapacitated that might harm his standing with the officers or men, or indicate anything but the most appropriate deference.

 

-

 

The sense is yet far from clear to him, but the day of the Carnivale Francis comes awake to a bubbling eagerness from the crew edging at his consciousness, perhaps the easier to notice for being in stark contrast to the quiet despair and lonely boredom which for so long has formed the backdrop to all their thoughts.

 

Tomorrow it will come, they are all thinking on this: the day will finally dawn.

 

And for tonight, there is the party.

 

Shelagh is as eager as him, and more, to get outside and moving and close to the men in body as well as mind.

 

He worries for how he will be treated – she has no such concern. She is sure as ever that her wolves and her men need her. She has been talking to them, it seems, whilst waiting for Francis to get back on his feet. Mostly of what not to eat.

 

 _We have a plan_ , she is telling Francis as Jopson helps him suit up in his slops. He is still taking extreme care with movement, and so not entirely paying attention. _Only_ dawn-wind-on-cold-ocean _doesn’t agree to help._

That’s Culloden, Dr Stanley’s wolfbrother. Of all the names! Francis wonders if the man even knows the Act of 1829 passed parliament – no basis for anti-Catholicism in law now.

 

 _He’s not the same as the rest of them_ , he comforts her. _Doctors are not officers, not as such._

 

She is unconvinced, and not very happy, but the prospect of a trip outside and of Francis being well enough to do it, and of reunion with Horatio swiftly take over her mind.

 

Reunion is not such an easy prospect to Francis, but it must happen, sooner or later.

 

With Jopson close and concerned beside them, carrying the storm lantern, he and Shelagh set out across the ice

 

It is so long since Francis saw anything but the inside of his cabin. And so much longer since there has been anywhere, any particular place that he has gone besides from one ship to the other. There is a thrill that runs over him just seeing the glow of the Carnivale tent in the distance; somewhere new, something unknown and colourful in the unrelenting ice.

 

Fitzjames dreamt this, he thinks. Somehow, in all the bleak nothing, Fitzjames saw how to conjure delight.

 

Shelagh is moving carefully, ears pricked, sniffing at the air. There has been no sign or sense of the Tuunbaaq since it was shot from the rigging and scared away from Thomas Blanky, and no sign of the woman either. Perhaps they have reunited, too? Francis still believes that that was what was wanted, by both of them, though perhaps too lost in their grief for the Tuunbaaq’s previous brother to manage it.

 

The walk is long, as Jopson warned, and Francis hot by the end of it despite the aching chill to all his body, sweat soaking his woollens and then starting to freeze against the skin. Shelagh is letting her tongue loll pink from her mouth, panting. She never gives any impression of working harder to move on her three good legs, but Francis suspects it would be easier on another wolf.

 

Neither of them is as young as they used to be, either.

 

Closer to the tents, he feels another thrill go through him, quickly followed by a surge of nausea, and realises that it is alcohol he can smell, and that despite everything it still calls, undefeated, to every atom of him.

 

“Are you alright, sir?”

 

“Yes, Jopson, thank you, I will be.” Francis puts a hand briefly on his steward’s arm, reassuring. “If I’m to be a navy man, I have to be able to be in places where others drink.”

 

That something is necessary does not make it possible – he knows that well enough – but what else is there to be done but try?

 

He can smell food too – roasting meat, oh how long since last he smelt that? And then closer to, he can start to hear the shouts and calls, awkward strains of music and off-key singing.

 

It is oddly charming, the sight of the tent and the raised flag, the sounds better suited to the boozy, sunset dwindlings of an English country fair than an Arctic night.

 

And yet he feels uneasy. Perhaps it is just his stomach, contracting at the scents of rich food, and his exhaustion from the walk.

 

His mouth is dry for a drink – for water, but there may not be any supplied here, when there is so much alternative.

 

Pushing at the canvas flaps of the tent, they all go inside.

 

Once, when Francis was first in London, young and even more foolish, he had journeyed to the famous Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Past their peak, he had been warned, but nonetheless he’d gone, fuelled with tales of two hundred years of luxury and magic.

 

They’d been dirty, more than anything. And the people there had been so miserable, for all their painted smiles. At that time in his life he’d still be teetotal, still with the memory of his father too clear in mind, and in every drunk’s eyes he’d seen the man, and the sadness.

 

Inside this Carnivale, there is something half the same, but magnified over and over, through mind after mind, funnelling into him via Shelagh.

 

The expectation and delight in planning had been true enough, but now this thing is happening, the lamps lit, the scenery up, the food roasted, and yet behind every face Francis sees the horror of not being able to forget. The knowledge that all this is pretence, a theatre, the knowledge of where they are and what is out there, just a flimsy canvas wall away, pressing down hard as ice.

 

And in that horror, both men and the officers are trying, it seems, to forget everything else, including perhaps their ranks and duties and all other things that must be held together to save them from this place.

 

Francis is certainly not the man to damn another for drowning his sorrows. But this is _dangerous._

 

He stomach lurches; he has to swallow dry once, and again.

 

Something else is creeping through this gathering, he is uncomfortably aware of it, some specific fear, some unease that Francis can feel in the sense but not quite hear – did another attack come, and no one tell him?

 

Fitzjames, Francis has been hearing distinctly in his mind all day: a steady and then faster pulse of energy and delight; the man is dressed as Britannia and being carried triumphant on the shoulders of Mr Hornby when Francis locates him in person in the largest of the tents.

 

Their eyes meet over the milling mass of men, and Francis is conscious of how hard they are both breathing.

 

Forget the nightmares; in the lucid, logical scenarios that Francis had put to himself about how this would go, the moment of taking the reins back from his Second in Command, he had imagined resentment, weary resignation or concern from Fitzjames, all fuelled by doubt.

 

But the man looks back at him now in the eerie lamplight with a face half-guilty, half-relieved.

 

Horatio is bounding over to Shelagh; they are dancing round each other, almost prancing on the snow and after a moment Horatio has rolled onto his back, giving her his belly, delighted.

 

Fitzjames stares at Francis, makes half a move towards him and stops. His cheeks are red – impossible to tell in the dim light if it is only paint.

 

Francis turns blindly, confused, stumbles into another antechamber – men in a pot, men being _cooked alive in a pot_ , has no one involved in planning this taken a moment to think?

 

He shakes his head, swallowing down hard at what rises in his throat. “I’m ending this now.”

 

“Francis!” Fitzjames has caught up with him, skirts gathered in his hands so he can run. Francis has never seem him look so ill at ease. “This was my idea, all of it. To get the men ready!”

 

Francis halts. “Ready?”

 

“I see… I see now I should have been more vigilant. But yes, ready. Ready to walk out.”

 

Walk out.

 

Fitzjames has seen that they should walk out.

 

Francis can almost hear the echoes of their conversation weeks earlier on this very topic, and whether it be by the sense they share or simply perceptiveness, Fitzjames makes a face as though he is hearing it too.

 

Half of him wants to crow. To push the man’s nose in it: _Oh, so you do agree with me, do you?_

 

Half of him wants to fall on Fitzjames’ neck and thank him for being that one man in a hundred who will, in the final reckoning, put pragmatism before pride.

 

Instead he straightens his shoulders, and gives his first order in twenty-two days:

 

“Gather the men, James. They deserve to know.”

 

-

 

“Remove your masks,” Francis tells the assembled company once they’re all together in the largest of the tented spaces. Strange, seeing them all gathered in one place – they’ve not done that since the lead parties went out, surely? Neither he nor Fitzjames have ever been much for Sunday services, which was how Sir John would bring them into congress, willing or not. “Let us look one another in the face as men.”

 

He has clambered onto a crate, and Shelagh onto another, raised up alongside him. She will be examining faces, and minds. Sending out her call to them along the sense, subtle to a man not bonded, but it ought to be enough. Must be enough.

 

Most of the other wolves are right at the front of the crowd, rapt.

 

“Frozen ships are good shelters,” Francis begins, “but they are not our homes. We’ve got homes we need to find our way back to. That is what you men are feeling the call of here tonight. Not in daydreams, but in this temple that you’ve built, to honour the call of all that we miss. Out of nothing and in little time with only vision and good work, I marvel at what you men have made.”

 

As he speaks, he feels his voice strengthening. He isn’t thick and he isn’t slurred, and he can think, at last, without the blur of the whisky in his veins.

 

“All this,” he tells them, gesturing round at the truly astonishing fairyland they stand in, “is more important than you know for what lies ahead.

 

“Let us speak plainly. In a few hours we welcome the first sunrise of the year. It will mark the end of the worst of a long and strange winter. Strange in ways we will find impossible to recount when we are safe and home.”

 

Shelagh tenses. Hairs on her back are rising. Perhaps she senses doubt, in his audience?

 

“To get there,” he continues firmly, “we can hope for a thaw come summer, but we no longer have the luxury to wait for one. So as soon as there are enough hours in the day for safe travel and if there are no signs of a break-up we will be abandoning both ships and walking out of here.”

 

 _Are they scared?_ He asks her. _Is that what is wrong?_

 

The men are murmuring; he must keep talking, convince them that this is an act of measured planning, not of desperation.

 

“Walking south to the mainland,” he tells them, and then he feels it, a disruption, something sad and aching in his sense, in Shelagh’s, and something else, something…

 

“This will take us overland across…” he stops.

 _Dawn wind on cold ocean_ says Shelagh, and he can hear the moment the fear truly hits her.

“Culloden!” he looks down at the wolves in the front line of the audience, and then up, finding his officers. “Has anyone seen Dr Stanley?”

 

Shelagh leaps down from the box pile; she is running to another part of the tent, and as one, Horatio and Crécy, Pisces and Leo and Ethelred all swarm after her, a sea of fur. There is another ripple of reaction through the men; the wolves have not gathered in numbers in too long either.

 

Then the growling starts, vicious, enough to make everyone startle and look about him.

 

 _No_ , Shelagh is commanding. Francis can hear her fear and her determination. _No, I will not allow it._

 

Francis has barely heard Culloden before, and can scarcely make him out now; something very scared, desperate, heartbroken: _Don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him, don’t…._

 

 _Your brother will not hurt mine,_ Shelagh is saying. _Will not hurt my pack_. And Francis is scrambling down the box, trying to get to where all this is happening – easy enough since all the men have drawn back, instinctively fearful.

 

“Who sealed the door flaps?” someone shouts.

 

The stink of alcohol is rising as Francis comes closer to the place where the wolves have gone, which doesn’t really make any sense – it shouldn’t smell as strong as that unless it was all over the place, unless…

 

He turns the corner, and sees them.

 

Shelagh, squared up against Culloden, all her pack behind her, teeth bared.

 

Culloden, standing in front of his brother, preventing the wolves and a few of the men who have also moved toward the commotion rather than away from it from getting any nearer.

  
Dr Stanley, backed up against the canvas wall, a mad grin on his painted clown-face, a cask of rum in one hand, a lit torch in the other.

 

Culloden is already dripping; his fur is soaked with the alcohol, fumes rising from the warmth of his body.   
  
Francis has to swallow bile.

 

“Samuel,” he makes himself say. “Dr Stanley. Douse that light. Would you hurt your brother this way?”

 

Stanley face is a white mask. He widens his eyes. “You have been telling them all what will happen if we walk. Well, I know. I know what happened to Sir John in Canada, I knew the doctor on that trip. I know that worse than boots were eaten, for those who survived to come home.”

 

Francis licks his lip. He steps forward, hands held out, palms down. “I know a little of what you speak, and I know that whatever may have happened on that journey, a lot of it came down to discord amongst the men. If we are strong, together…”

 

“We’ve never been that, not in three years,” Stanley spits back. “You’ve never been able to make us that.”

 

There’s a groan from a corner of the space, and for a moment Francis fears he has miscounted and that a wolf has already been injured and crept over there to die, for the lump lying there is furry, light in colour… But she raises her head, then, looking round in a daze, her face and clothes drenched in blood. It is the Esquimaux woman.

 

“Many things can be mended,” Francis promises, forcing himself to ignore her and the people who started talking behind him when they caught sight of her too. “I have learnt that, if any man has. But if you do this, Samuel, you end all hope for yourself.”

 

“Not just for me,” Stanley’s grin is a like a skeleton’s. “No one is leaving this tent tonight.”

 

From the wider chamber, there is still shouting, rising in volume; someone is calling for a knife – _tied, they’re all tied tight, we can’t get out!_

 

 _Yes,_ Francis tells Shelagh, and she lunges.

 

Culloden goes for her, Horatio for Culloden, with Crécy following soon after, and the others pile in and soon there is blood everywhere, and flame.

 

-

 

“One man and one wolf dead,” Francis remarks, sighing. “An arm dislocated and black eyes and broken fingers from the crush to get out, and poor Horatio with that chunk Culloden bit from his shoulder, besides the Lady Silence’s intriguing decision regarding self-surgery and a goodly portion of our possessions up in smoke.”

 

“It could all have been far worse,” Fitzjames answers, none the less intense for being spoken softly.

 

They are in the expanded sickbay in what had once been the great cabin on Erebus, where Dr Peddie has come over from Terror to treat the injured. Horatio has been stitched, and is now lying in a bunk – under extreme protest, from what Francis can sense – whilst Fitzjames gently strokes him and Shelagh lies over his uninjured side, occasionally licking at his jaw.

  
Only hours since the narrow aversion of disaster, and many men have not yet had time to change – Francis has seen Roman soldiers, kings and bawdy women bandaged up whilst he’s been here. Fitzjames is still in his robes, oddly regal in his obvious distress.

 

“It would undoubtedly have been worse, and many more than Dr Stanley and Culloden lost to us now,” Fitzjames continues, “were it not for you.”

 

Francis looks away. “Shelagh perhaps. I did nothing.”

 

Fitzjames shakes his head. “I was thinking, that if I ever lost my reason as Dr Stanley did, that I hoped my brother would join the pack to end me, would know that that was what I needed from him. Not stand by me, obliged, heartbroken, as poor Culloden did.”

 

Both the wolves shift, restless, distressed. The way Culloden felt, torn between the love for his bonded and the needs of the pack, is something none of them will recover from fast.

 

“And then I thought: how much reason have I lost already, allowing that situation to happen?” Fitzjames’ voice cracks, a little, at the edges. It might just be smoke inhalation.

 

“It was not your fault, James.” Francis takes a deep breath. “Your idea was sound, and well-executed in the main. Beautifully executed, in fact – I spoke the truth, I am amazed by what was built there. But you have not been on a polar mission before, and so you did not know how quickly order would break. For Dr Stanley’s actions you bear no blame. Perhaps he’d gone mad, perhaps he was a coward, perhaps he was a realist – but that he would take that action at that particular time, no one could have predicted.”

 

“When I told the officers we would walk – I should have seen then how it distressed him, should have been ready to…”

 

“We’ll get nowhere fast on ‘should have,’ James.” Francis shakes his head. “As I say, expeditions like this – men get to a strange place within themselves.”

 

Fitzjames looks at him, intent: “The darkness.”

 

Francis tilts his head, inquiring.

 

“Something Blanky told me,” Fitzjames explains. “About John Ross at Fury Beach.”

 

“Yes, well, they came back from that to tell the tale.” Francis cards his fingers into Shelagh’s coat, into the comforting warmth of her.

 

“How?”

 

The urgency in Fitzjames’ voice cuts deep. Francis pushes back in the sense without pausing to think – not a reassurance, not a muffling as Sir John would do to him, simply a nudge, the mental equivalent of the way the wolves butt their heads to a man’s legs: _I am here too._

 

Suddenly they are looking each other in the eye.

 

“Many things,” Francis says, and swallows. “Skill. Luck. I believe that there happened to be cubs on that mission, that particular spring. That helps the men considerably, in my experience.”

 

“Cubs? Oh. Oh, I see.” Now Fitzjames is looking away from him.

 

For all it is coming up on eight months since Sir John died, Francis would swear that this is the first time Fitzjames has really understood what their new command structure means, for the wolves. For them as the brothers of those wolves.

 

“Francis,” Fitzjames begins, and pauses. He is looking down at Horatio, and at Shelagh curled round him, and Francis is suddenly aware of how, in caressing their wolves, he and Fitzjames have come rather close to brushing hands.

 

“Francis…” Fitzjames tries again.

 

“Captain Crozier!”

 

It is Goodsir, still in his slops. Francis had not expected to see him away from the Lady Silence any time soon; she had been amongst those taken to Terror, and Goodsir had gone there with Peddie on the return to the ship, leaving Bridgens and MacDonald for Erebus.

 

“Captain Crozier,” Goodsir says again. “I have you tell you something urgently about our canned food.”

 

-

 

“Can it be done?” Lt Little asks, contemplating the maps strewn across the table.

 

“It will be done,” Francis assures him. “Over the past two days myself and Captain Fitzjames have established a plan we believe will serve, but the reason we have gathered our officers, and other polar veterans”, he gestures to Thomas, and to Dr MacDonald, “to this meeting now, is to discuss them. Our plan is to head south, to the mainland and up Back’s Fish River to the Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Resolution.” He gestures to one of the charts, indicating with his callipers. “This will take us overland across the length of what we now know is indeed King William Island.”

 

That is all he plans to allow himself of ‘I told you so.’ He feels an interesting tickle in his brain when Fitzjames notes it, and laughs silently, dryly, bitterly with him.

 

“We will be crossing during hunting months,” Francis continues. “So we stand a good chance of running into Netsilik people. Despite our shortfalls with them they will help us, I am certain.”

 

“How far is that, altogether?” Goodsir, sounding nervous.

 

“Eight hundred miles,” Fitzjames answers.

 

“And our food supplies?”

 

Francis shifts in his chair. He misses the whisky at times like this as much as a way of giving himself another moment to construct an answer as anything.

 

“Gentlemen,” he says, “you will all no doubt be aware by now of Dr Goodsir’s discoveries regarding the lead solder contamination of the cans. This makes them poisonous to us; the problem being that it is a poison which kills slowly, more slowly than starvation, and salt pork is much less easy to transport.”

 

“And poorer as an anti-scorbutic,” Dr MacDonald chips in. “Although whether it be the lead or the generally low quality of the cans, we are seeing more and more cases of scurvy no matter what the men are eating.”

 

“Our supplies situation is no reason not to go, in fact more reason to do so,” Fitzjames says quickly “We know from the calculations of the good Lt. Irving at the last command meeting that we cannot last through another winter. We must move before October, and we have no reason to think that this summer will bring a thaw, when the last two did not.”

 

Thomas clears his throat. “Lt. Irving in his estimations was judging that the cans, when not spoiled, were edible. What happens if we try and avoid them? What does the lead do to a man? Is there any cure for it?”

 

MacDonald looks at Goodsir, gestures in deference to him.

 

“Only to stop taking it in.” Goodsir pushes his glasses up his nose. “And it does any manner of things. Headaches are the first, and thirst. It can cause loss of memory and other mental derangement that… well, it is more than likely Dr Stanley’s actions two days ago can be accounted for from this.”

 

Francis is not so sure, but let that be the judgment; accusing Stanley of being a cold, selfish bastard will not get them another spoonful of meat now.

 

Thomas clears his throat. “So, say we were not to eat again from the cans. How many days left then?”

 

Lt. Irving opens his ledger. He is frowning.

 

“We cannot tell the men,” Hodgson interrupts, and Little looks ready to argue the point, when Shelagh stands up and then, without hesitation, climbs up on Fitzjames’ lap and from there onto the centre of the table. Her head is now feet above any of them and she looks down as might an Empress.

 

Leo stands; Crécy, Pisces and Ethelred follow.

 

Horatio has meanwhile climbed onto a chest; not as high as her, but elevated; he and she exchange a kind of bow.

 

 _There will be food_. Shelagh tells Francis. And presumably her pack, because Francis can see the moment this is relayed to the officers, second hand from their brothers.

_We will hunt._

 

Francis stares at her, casts a glance at Fitzjames who looks just as shocked. This is not what naval wolves are for, nothing that they will ever have done in their lives. Keeping off predators, perhaps, but not this. No wolf hunted with Ross or Parry.

 

But then, with Ross and Parry the food held out.

 

 _What are you thinking of?_ He asks her, in entirely genuine interest.

 

Shelagh draws herself up, surveying them all, before gracefully making her way back to the floor.

 

 _My pack_ , she tells him, as though that is all that is needed.

 

With the wolves settled again, Le Vesconte clears his throat. “And what of the native woman, sir? Is she to travel with us when we go? She upset the men, you know, before – you know, Captain Fitzjames, how it was.”

 

Francis carefully does not look to Fitzjames; he is in command, and he can project no uncertainty. And though he doesn’t look, he can feel the nudge of steady support Fitzjames sends his way.

 

The sensation is getting more familiar, but never any less surprising.

 

“We are aware of the potential problems,” Francis tells the meeting firmly. “Nonetheless, I am convinced that we have nothing to fear and possibly a deal to gain from her company. Whether she would wish to travel alongside us is another matter. I shall come with the Erebus company now, and pay her a visit, and we shall see.”

 

It isn’t words he gets from Fitzjames, as the meeting disperses, not precisely. But the warm glow of approval, of quiet hope, is certainly nothing his own brain is likely to produce.

 

He feels a little shy, pushing back a reciprocation, a hint of gratefulness in return, even as they both suit up in their slops to journey over the ice.

 

-

 

“She cut her tongue out for Tuunbaaq, it would appear,” says Goodsir. “But it, er, he turned away from her.”

 

He speaks apologetically, though it is not clear if this is because he fears the woman will understand and be offended – which is in fact fairly likely at this point, Francis supposes – or because he doubts that his commanding officer will believe his words.

 

“Why should it want her to remove her tongue?” Francis asks him. “Did she explain that?”

 

A loud cough from the corner of the room distracts him. The woman is sitting up on her pile of blankets, staring at him. She gestures at her head; her mouth, her ears, waves her hand dismissively, her meaning clear: _I am not deaf._

 

<<Why does the Tuunbaaq need your tongue?>> he tries again, in the best Netsilik he can manage. <<I have a wolf. We are… together. But no injury. Can you explain?>>

 

She narrows her eyes. She gestures, open palmed, wide-eyed: _Why?_ And then taps the wall of the room, points at the whole ship. _Why this?_ Or perhaps _Why are you here?_

  
Francis will concede that when it comes to people in this room who have made apparently nonsensical decisions, she is not alone.

 

<<It is like me and my wolf? You and Tuunbaaq?>>

 

She tilts her head to one side, breathes out a heavy sigh. The light catches her face differently, and for a moment he sees how tired she is, and how despairing.

 

No one has come for her, not in all this time. No friends or relations seeking her out. Perhaps that is the way, or perhaps whatever she and her father were doing was taboo to other eyes, but she is supposed to have her father, or her Tuunbaaq, and neither is with her now.

 

Francis could threaten her again. He could try to turn her away. He could let her stay in their hold and hide.

 

All those things, they have done. Nothing has got them – or her – anywhere.

 

When she cut her tongue and Tuunbaaq turned her away, she chose to come back to them. She has already asked them for help in that action, and if she wouldn’t do so in so many words, even when she had the ability to shape them, can he of all people blame her?

 

 _Come in here_ , Francis finds himself calling, and Shelagh – who has been on the orlop deck with Horatio and Ethelred, making some sort of hunting strategy – moves towards the slops room instead.

 

It was already a small room, with himself and Goodsir in the doorway and the woman on most of the floor and now a trellwolf is squeezing in too.

 

Shelagh tenses as she first sniffs the air, but continues to enter, glad to get herself between Francis and the stink of the beast that still lingers on the woman’s clothing.

 

Silence watches her, unmoving. Suddenly Francis sees that there are tears in the woman’s eyes, hanging and sparkling.

 

Slowly, Shelagh moves the final step forward.

 

After a long, frozen moment, Silence holds out her hand, opening up to offer her palm.

 

Delicately, Shelagh sniffs at it, then licks.

 

And Silence brings her damp hand to her face, smelling too.

 

Then: _clear air when sky fire comes_ someone says. A voice Francis has never heard before, slipping into his mind like mercury.

 

It is Silence, speaking not with her mutilated mouth, but into the sense. Into the sense where words have no language.

 

 _clear air when sky fire comes_ , Silence says, and gets onto one knee, giving a formal half-bow.

 

Francis finds he cannot quite breathe.

 

 _Yes_ , says Shelagh, happily, and ducks her head in answer. _Yes, that is my name._

 

-

 

“She can speak in the sense, then? Because she is supposed to be bonded with this… spirit creature? Francis, I cannot… I find it very hard to sit and speak of such things as though they are normal.”

 

Francis studies his glass – he and Fitzjames are both drinking up what is left of the lemon juice, mixed with sugar and water, on Dr Peddie’s orders. It is foul stuff and it makes his teeth ache. “We do not live as the Esquimaux do,” he says, “so perhaps it stands to reason that they do not bond like us. And if trellwolves are something extraordinary, then this Tuunbaaq is a step beyond, something we can scarcely dream of.”

 

“And that would be a nightmare, I should say.” Fitzjames frowns. “Do we know if she even chose this bonding? If her father did? Has she given you a sense of that?’

 

“She is not much more loquacious with her mind than she ever was with her tongue. But she is afraid of the creature, for sure. And yet she longs for it. If you could have felt, James, when she let Shelagh’s mind touch hers…”

 

“Is she our pack now too, then? Or at any rate, does Shelagh think so?”

 

“Would that be a problem?”

 

Fitzjames clears his throat, looks away. “Can she help our wolves to hunt, do you think? That is the main thing that concerns me presently. And I fear even if they can, it will only solve our meat problem, not the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables.”

 

“Have you ever seen an Esquimaux with scurvy?” Francis challenges, then laughs. “I forget, you have only met the two. That people live on raw meat, in the main, and do very well.”

 

“Perhaps, being a different race, a different physiology..?”

 

Francis winces as though his lemon had the sugar left out. “Don’t speak that way.”

 

“Why?”

 

“You ask that? Perhaps you wouldn’t understand, being English, being a white man.”

 

“What if I told you I wasn’t entirely sure I was either of those things?”

 

Francis for a moment thinks it is a joke in extremely poor taste. But no, he can feel it, around the edge of that ever-present sense between them: that this is the truth, and how much Fitzjames fears it.

 

“I would say…” Francis searches. “I would say that respect is earned by actions.”

 

Fitzjames takes a deep breath. “I should not have spoken to you so.”

 

“No, you were entirely right.” Francis sighs. “And right to say it, for that matter. I can only apologise, for how I was then.”

 

“I never imagined you would do what you did. Stopping.” Fitzjames clears his throat. “It is not… I know how hard it can be on a man, fighting the body like that.”

 

Francis does not ask; he can half feel it though - a memory comprised of heat and a musky sweet smell, and trying to drag someone out of… begging them to leave the opium den and… desperation…sorrow…

 

“I shan’t tell you another story about China,” Fitzjames says wryly. “But it was not… Telling the tales I told, the way I told them. That is how a man from nowhere, like me, ends up at the right hand of someone like Sir John Franklin.”

 

Francis raises an eyebrow. “And how pleased are you, at this moment, with that particular success?”

 

Fitzjames holds his gaze, seems – and to Francis’ surprise – actually to ponder this.

 

“One way or another,” Fitzjames says slowly, “I know that this mission will define my life. For however much there may be left of it. And I accept that.”

 

It has never particularly occurred to Francis before that Fitzjames could have died, rather than Sir John, had Sir John not taken it into his mind to inspect the hunting hide himself that day.

 

The thought leaves him slightly breathless.

 

-

 

For the duration of the first hunting expedition Francis paces the deck, unable to rest until he can see Shelagh again, even though he can feel her in his mind the whole time; her happiness, her exhilaration in running at the head of her pack. The other wolves are in his mind as well – he catches the triumph Crécy feels, being the first to capture a small ring-seal in his jaws.

 

The day is still very short, and it is a scarcely two hours of pacing for him before the call goes up that they are sighted on the sunset-streaked horizon – Shelagh and Horatio leading the way back, Silence striding along behind, a spear in her hand, a bag over her shoulder, Goodsir at her side, and then the other wolves, all but Ethelred, who has helped anchor the sense here and has been mildly peeved about it all the while.

 

It is not much meat – and Lady Silence implies, though diplomatically, that the wolves may have hindered more than helped: _they will be more useful for land game_ , she adjudges – but there is just enough for every man in sick bay with signs of scurvy to receive two good chunks, and the remainder is added to the general pot.

 

And the men were cheering, when the party returned. Francis will not forget that quickly.

 

Can Silence hear him, when he pushes through his gratitude to her? For this food, for her patience, for giving him his wolf’s name?

 

She has been keeping to her room on Erebus, and suffering only Goodsir for company, but the day after the hunt when Fitzjames and Lt. Vesconte cross over for the command meeting, she makes a third figure alongside.

 

“She is teaching Horatio jokes about the snow,” Fitzjames announces when he enters the great cabin, sounding slightly exasperated. “I think, were one able to smell as a wolf can, they would be… unsuitable for mixed company.”

 

He laughs darkly, then coughs – usual enough moving from the cold air to warm, Francis tells himself.

 

Silence pays close attention to the meeting, and takes away one of the maps afterwards to study – the way she understands the landscape is quite unlike drawings in boxes, she communicates to Francis, but if she can make the two align she will tell them what they ought to be doing.

 

-

 

“And now we find ourselves in February,” Francis remarks, turning over another page of the log, smoothing it down with his hand. The paper is cool, smooth, against the chapped, cold-damaged skin. “I feel I should record that our wolves are now so adept at seal-fishing that they even occasionally catch one.”

 

Fitzjames chuckles and pours their tea from the tray Jopson has brought in. “Yes, I look forward to seeing what they bring us today. Apparently Dr Goodsir is an apt, if modest, pupil. I think there may be something in having him in turn teach others – for when we travel. Although if we are on land there’ll be precious little use knowing how to fish through ice.”

 

“Well you never know, James, maybe these men can use that knowledge on their next Discovery Service trip to either pole.”

 

Now Fitzjames does laugh, until he breaks into coughing again.

 

“Have you been to Dr MacDonald about that chest of yours?”

 

Fitzjames shakes his head. “I shall do. It’s nothing, and they have greater and more pressing concerns.”

 

Francis sighs. Despite the best efforts of the hunting parties – human and lupine - it is simply not the season for game. They therefore still face a daily quandary over whether to feed the men the canned foods, that may be deadly but remain deeply desirable when there is so very little else.

 

The lemon juice is not used up, but, despite its nastiness, the number of those suffering scorbutic symptoms – the doctors all agree – suggest that it has very little potency left. As it stands, the hunting parties are just bringing home enough to reverse the worst of the sickbay cases, but nothing like enough to keep all one hundred and fifteen remaining men safe from harm.

 

“Nonetheless, it’s a matter of weeks until we walk, now. You must be fit to lead the men.” Francis clears his throat. “They look up to you, James. You have a manner to you that I believe… I have observed, in the sense, how well you cheer them, how you can offer comfort.”

 

“Belief matters a great deal,” Fitzjames says. The tips of his ears have gone slightly red. In the sense, Francis can feel his pleased embarrassment, but outwardly he is quite composed. It is surprising to Francis, still, how much the man keeps hidden, and how well. “I am not speaking of religion, you understand. Belief in oneself can take a man a great way, and if he has not that, if he sees another believes in him – that can be a powerful force.”

 

Francis cannot help laughing. “Belief in oneself! What an interesting sensation that must be.”

 

Fitzjames does not smile. He puts down his tea cup.

 

“When Sir John spoke to you, on Erebus, the day he died…”

 

“James, please.” Francis waves his hand. “The time is passed and the man is gone, and we do not need to…”

 

“Yes, we do. I do.” Fitzjames sits up in his chair. He is in his white woollens under his waistcoat, and his hair is in a loose tie, black as pitch against it.

 

“You know I heard what Sir John said. You also know… there is no need to inventory your character or his many mistaken estimations.”

 

“Or where he was most accurate?”

 

“I would thank God, if I ever addressed Him, that you do not drink now.” Fitzjames is meeting his gaze steady and firm, unblinking. “Other than that, I would beg you to understand that I reject everything – _everything_ Sir John said of you. If any man on this expedition goes home to tell tales to his family, it will be you he has to thank.”

 

Francis makes himself take a breath.

 

Another man might express gratitude. Another man might enjoy this moment, this brief warm interlude.

 

But Francis always has his alarm bell – Sir John was right about that – and he cannot be silent.

 

“Sir John had cause to know me… more intimately than some,” he points out. Then he stands up, unable to bear sitting still and close a moment longer. Walks a few paces, reaches the limits of the great cabin, turns. Wishes, itches for a drink to distract himself. “Perhaps we should discuss it. What will come, with spring. You have not been in such a situation before, I think?”

 

Fitzjames stands, though he does not move any nearer, or any further away.

 

The sense between them is full, suddenly, in a flood of feeling Francis cannot tie down to one emotion. Some mixture of fear and weariness, of care and concern.

 

And that is rather easier than words.

 

Fitzjames’ chest is rising and falling, his pulse visible in his neck.

 

“Francis,” he says. “Captain, I…” breaking off, he looks away, visibly struggling.

 

“James? There is nothing for you to be afraid of here, I promise you that.” Francis clears his throat, looks away. “And your role in this, with your brother… there is no dishonour for a man in that.”

 

“Respect is earned by actions, and likewise disdain, I suppose, may be earned by what a man has done,” Fitzjames says slowly. He has grasped the back of the chair where he was sitting, beats a tattoo on the wood with his fingers. “As you know, I am a man who has been to many places, and done many things. Which is to say…” he draws himself up. “Which is to say, I would never judge you, Francis, for doing without choice something I have elected to do myself, in the past. And I… I say this because I would not, in any way whatsoever, wish to discomfort you or have you believe I see anything in a man’s intimate behaviour that pertains to his worth.”

 

Francis stares at him. “I see,” he says, having to try twice, swallowing over a dry mouth.

 

He is not disgusted, he finds, but not quite able to think of anything to say either. That anyone would choose to do...that, he has not really considered, although he’s been in the Navy long enough to know people do.

 

A younger Fitzjames, somewhere out in the world, _choosing_ to let men… _Wanting_ …

 

Francis has questions, now, but no idea how to form them.

 

Fitzjames reaches for his pen. He is still breathing rather fast – as well he might, for his admission, as a matter of technicality, could be enough to see him hanged.

 

“Shall I send for some more tea?” Francis asks, voice almost level.

 

“No, I thank you, not presently.”

 

The sense between them swirls, opaque, but still warm.

 

And they sit in quiet that is not uncomfortable, for all it is a little strange, working side by side on their papers, and Francis knows Fitzjames can tell, as he does, when the wolves are nearly back to them, and how close Shelagh is coming to forcing them to confront this issue again.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It is two days behind my plan, I am so sorry. Also the eagle-eyed will spot that there is now another chapter coming after this one, so this is not done yet! It just got so long in my edits that I felt I had to cut it up. But (wifi willing, I always feel the need to say, lest I jinx it) we really are nearly there. Thank you for the gorgeous comments <3

_April 1848_

 

In what seems like far too short a time, despite the hard going on the ground, the ships are no longer visible behind them.

 

Francis lingered, at the end. Paced the gutted decks of Terror, patting hulls and beams much as one might comfort a faithful but injured horse, Shelagh patient at his side. Wolves are not much for sentiment, and she had felt a slight unease at leaving familiar territory, and a sorrow that he was sad, nothing more. She did not imbue the ship with a character, with the capacity to feel abandoned.

 

“You did right by me, always,” Francis had whispered to his cabin walls “This is not your fault.” It was not, after all, as though half a minute’s more foolishness can do much harm to this expedition.

 

“Frozen ships make good shelters,” James had quoted at him, gently, as Francis had joined his second in command and the sledges on the ice. “But they are not our homes.”

 

Francis fitted on his goggles, smiling wryly. _Wise words, whoever said them. But I am not sure they are true of myself. I have been on Terror longer than I’ve been anywhere else in my life taken together. She’s as much family as I know. And I am leaving her here to rot._

He’d stumbled, just a little, when James, Horatio and Shelagh had all pushed back to him in the sense at once, together, warm and soothing. Looking over at James without quite meaning to, he’d seen the high colour in his cheeks with a mixture of relief and concern.

 

Softly, James slid memories between them; _a great house, a wide garden, green lawns and croquet, shrubbery and hide-and-seek, the earthy, lush scent of the hothouse, the sticky cling of tobacco flowers under fingers…_

 

It was James’ childhood, and that childhood had at one time been almost idyllic – so much Francis was able to gather. This was a memory of what a home felt like unpolluted by fear; the kind of home every child deserved. For a moment Francis let himself enjoy understanding how that felt, even as he started walking. But something curled at the edges of the nostalgia; frosty, unclear.

 

When he shot another glance over, James was looking away from him. The sense had silenced – at least as much as it ever did now. James did not want questions.

 

Francis had tried to put his mind only to the journey.

 

Now they have come to a rest stop, and he has climbed a small ridge to look back and has found he cannot see anything but the white of the undulating ice. It is as though the ships had never existed at all.

 

Francis turns away from them once more, looking down at the group.

 

Mr Diggle has set up his stove, that they may all enjoy something at least half warm before moving on again, and several men are assisting with this, whilst others rest, stretched out, exhausted on the ice. The wolves in the party are gathered around Shelagh, annoying her with their solicitous attentions. Lady Silence, too, goes to where Shelagh is, and is permitted to feed her some scrap of dried meat from the bag she carries at her waist.

 

James is talking to Lt. Irving, gesturing at the sledges.

 

The man had better not be trying to put himself on the hauling rota. Francis frowns, and sees Shelagh shoving Leo away and padding over to James, nosing insistently at his side. He gives her his attention at once, his hands in her fur and smoothing over her back. Francis can hear in the sense that, unlike himself, she has no compunction about ordering James to be careful.

 

Horatio has been scenting at the boundaries of the encampment; he picks up the discussion, and tells anyone who cares to listen how strongly he advises doing whatever Shelagh demands. Francis can’t quite help smiling as he climbers back down into the camp himself.

 

 _How are you faring?_ he asks his sister. _Usually you tire more easily when you’re in this way._

It is just possible to discern the swell of her abdomen now, despite her fur. An odd sight, when most of the company, wolf and human, are ever thinner.

 

 _Pisces wants me to ride in the boat!_ Shelagh informs him by way of response, thoroughly disgusted.

 

_I wish you and James both would. I’d pull you myself._

 

She turns her tail on him and flounces off, leaving him chuckling for a moment before his worries descend again.

 

They have abandoned the ships on April 22nd 1848, and he feels that he’s left more than wood and sailcloth and his best imitation of a home behind him.

 

Out here it is more obvious than ever how little stands between his men, his wolves and death.

 

Out here it is more obvious than ever what really matters to him, in the end.

 

-

 

It had been the middle of March, when Shelagh had started building her blanket den. When Horatio had started paying even more attention to her, and had been met with alternating tolerance and irritation. When he had begun imposing his dominance on the other males in a manner most unlike him - joint meals in the officers’ mess on Erebus had become a logistical nightmare of posturing animals.

 

Meanwhile back on Terror, Jopson had been apologetic that the sugared biscuits had all been eaten long ago – not that they would have lasted the year in any case – but still there in his wicker basket of supplies there had been the oilcloth for the bed, and the carefully preserved soft towels, and that little china pot of grease.  

 

Francis had sighed, watching him make ready. “I have been embarrassed, before, seeing you prepare this room – and I note that you try to hide it from me now – but after the weeks we spent this past winter, Jopson, with the whisky bottle and the cup, I doubt you can see me at any less advantage.”

 

“I am proud to do it for you, sir. It is a very wonderful thing, if I may make so bold.”

 

“Is that your opinion? Truly?”

 

Jopson swallowed, ducking his head. “I do not mean that it is necessarily good, only that it is wondrous. Like the great bear, or… like the Aurora Borealis, sir, or the way a compass can tell north.”

 

“Well, and maybe the compass doesn’t want to point that way, for that matter.” Francis had waved him away, not seeing profit in discussing it further, but it had been interesting, the stray thoughts he was sensing from his steward. Not disgust; by no means that at all.

 

Soon – all too soon – the sweating had started, and had so far resembled the first stages of his withdrawal that Francis felt sick almost by association, and likewise beset by a sudden recollection of the urge to drink that was entirely horrible.

 

But he weathered that, and took the reports from a crewman that Little, Hodgson and Irving, together with Crécy, Leo and Pisces were safely berthed and sedated on Erebus. The crewman was also carrying a dispatch bag, which Francis was preparing to set aside for the following days, assuming routine reports, before the man – Mr Hartnell – cleared his throat.

 

“That being from Captain Fitzjames, sir, and he said please to ask you to read it at once.”

 

Damn the man – Fitzjames of all people should know that no ship’s business could reliably be undertaken today, and tomorrow and possibly all the next, if Shelagh did not crest to readiness soon and get them started. She had always been hard to predict in that regard.  

 

Dismissing Hartnell, Francis sat back – wincing a little, at the jostling of his vitals that were poised between roused and nauseous, still – and broke the seal.

 

_Francis –_

_It has occurred to me that there is ample laudanum, and Horatio and I can keep here with the others, as we have every year before. Only send me word so, and I will do this._

_James_

 

Francis sat back. He read the note again, and then over, and then once more.

 

Aware of his hand trembling slightly, he dug for his handkerchief and rubbed it over his brow.

 

Fitzjames had been ready to weather this – of that much Francis had been assured, by the sense, by what the man had said, by every one of his actions in the past month. Since that unexpected confession they had not spoken directly of such matters again, but in general terms Fitzjames might best have been described as _obliging_ , rather than…

 

So, was this reticence intended, perhaps, for Francis’ benefit?

 

Such a thing was unheard of.

 

When you bonded to a wolf, you accepted that you had no choice in what came with it – so the world had been for hundreds if not thousands of years. Francis was not aware of any case in history when a man bonded to a sister had been given a choice to simply… avoid the situation that might place him in.

 

Breathing slowly, Francis had allowed the idea to hover in his mind. It came with a fleeting sense of pure relief.

 

Fleeting – it was only moments before Shelagh was looking up at him, curious and somewhat concerned with what was making his heart race so fast.

 

<<You know what you need to do>>, so the Lady Silence had told Francis. And it was as true now as it ever had been.

 

 _It was never my fault it didn’t work before_ , Francis found himself saying – whether aloud or just to Shelagh, he couldn’t have sworn either way. He had often had the thought, but this had been the first moment that he had entirely believed it to be true.

 

He had been able to do nothing for his men for so long, with regard to the pack sense or anything else. But he could do this.

 

And if this time it was better, then maybe this way he could save them all.

 

Cornelius Hickey was going nowhere, with all his sly words and cold plans – a man who would head into the dark to capture a woman and would talk two others into joining him would not just take his whipping as a lesson and be done, Francis knew that much.

When the crew walked out onto the ice, they would leave not only their shelters but the last reminders of the more invisible structures of naval discipline. Anything that could bind them together, and to him, on that long march, could make the difference between success and disaster.

 

And Shelagh… he could feel her need, her longing, and beyond that her excitement. She liked Horatio. She wanted to do this with him, in a way she never had with the males who had been chosen for her before by the vagaries of naval rank.

 

Francis would not take this away from her. He owed her that much, and a great deal more.

 

And with Fitzjames it would not… Francis had borne with worse than Fitzjames, in his time - he could think of it that way. He had never chosen any of them, but given his time over and all the men who had ever queued at his cabin door in the springtime, Francis would not put Fitzjames last amongst them.

 

Thus decided, Francis had sat back in his chair and opened the pack sense, reaching in carefully, slowly, aware of the calm before the storm.

 

He was bracing his hands on the edge of the table. He took a deep breath, steadying.   

 

 _Come to us_ , he had sent across to Horatio, and to Horatio’s brother, adding his call to Shelagh’s, and had felt a surge rolling back, enough to take his breath away.

 

-

 

They are heading across the ice in the barely visible tracks of Lt Little’s advance party, who left a week earlier with the mission to establish a land camp ready to receive them. Little’s team had been selected to include the fittest of them – for all that signifies, now. Some of the men walking with Francis now will need to lie down as soon as they arrive. Some may not even last till then. Francis knows this from what he sees and from how it feels, thrumming like a new bruise in his awareness, louder with each struggling step.

 

 _How goes it?_ Francis asks towards Little and Crécy, and despite the weariness of walking, the ache in his head from the glare of the sun off the ice, is pleased to feel a broad sensation of _calm_ push back.

 

It is still beyond him to converse in words with any but Horatio and James, but every day it seems that the detail he can exchange with his Pack is growing.

 

Horatio and James notice this communication, in fact, and Francis feels James relax too at Little’s message, relieved just a little in his fears.

 

As ever, any relief is short lived; there is so much pain that the men feel, and of so many kinds – the purely physical, the mental and everything in-between - that soon Francis is forced to retreat into himself simply to bear to keep moving.

 

But they are moving.

 

When darkness falls, they pitch their tents for their first night on the ice, and there is a great occupation to be had in getting this done, assembling the cookstoves, supplies, plates, cups, freshwater melt, fuel and bedding from their various stowage.

 

Francis eats seated on a low stool in a rough sort of circle with the other officers. Everyone is happy to be eating, and he lets his sense relish that alongside his food.

 

 _Is it out here?_ James, not looking up at him but continuing to eat, affecting unconcern so that the others do not notice.

 

_Why? Can you feel it, James?_

 

_I’m not used to feeling… all this. I’m worried I could miss something, there’s so much. How did you stand this, alone?_

 

_I didn’t._

James does look up, now, eyes wide, apologetic.

 

Francis smiles at him, then catches himself, puts his attention to his plate.

 

The tents they have with them are only small, the larger having all been taken by Lt Little, and for this reason as well as warmth each must be shared by several sleeping men.

 

Francis lies next to Shelagh, and James brackets her on the other side, with Horatio behind James and a blanket over them all. Irving, Pisces, Hodgson and Leo make a similar grouping in the same tent; it is a blessing of being an officer, undoubtedly, to enjoy the excess heat the wolves give off packed tight in this way.

 

In the dark, Francis cannot see where Shelagh is licking at James’ face, or why, but experience and her rising concern, and the slight coppery smell on the air can help him guess.

 

James sighs. _I’m not the only man on this expedition with scurvy, Francis, and I’m not the only one who’ll survive it, when we have proper food again._

 

It is not at all easy, managing this connection. Francis wishes he thought the darkness could also hide the sensation of his self-conscious blush.

 

James must know how much Francis wants to reach over and take his hand.

 

Can James tell why?

 

It is not a conversation they can have like this, at this time; that much Francis knows for sure. He keeps his peace, and tries to follow the wolves into sleep.

 

-

 

Francis had heard Thomas Blanky greeting Captain Fitzjames onto the Terror’s sloping deck, and was aware of Jopson making final checks of water jugs and ships biscuits and leaving the room.

 

And then the door to the great cabin had opened again, and Fitzjames had entered, Horatio wriggling and jumping at his side.

 

“She’s in my cabin, still,” Francis said, as his first words of greeting, brisk and business like. He indicated the closed door with his head. “I’ll know when she’s ready but we must wait – she might hurt him, otherwise, for he’ll be ready now.”

 

“Indeed he is,” Fitzjames answered dryly, regarding his brother who was fairly flinging himself around the great cabin, and then swallowed. He was breathing rather hard. “Thank you, though, I…” he stopped, looking away, rather with the air of someone at their first dinner party being assisted on the etiquette of knives, forks and soup spoons. It was amusing, in a man generally so self-assured. He cleared his throat. “And you? Are you… ready? I can step out again quite easily.”

 

Francis stared at him. “Me?”

 

“The, uh,” Fitzjames was holding his woollen Welsh cap in one hand; he used it to gesture towards the little china pot.

 

Francis frowned – what, he was expected to serve in this, was he? But no sooner did that anger start to rise than he felt, again, streaming back, Fitzjames’ nervous concern: whatever the man was getting at, he had no intention of trying to assert himself.

 

“Aye,” Francis had said slowly. “There’s grease in the pot, ready for you.”

 

“Oh? Oh, I see. Uh, certainly,” Fitzjames’ eyes had gone wide. He moved forwards as if towards it.

 

“What are you doing? I told you, she’s not ready yet. We must wait on her.”

 

“But if you want me to… I was given to understand that once the sister is in fact ready, there is no time for us to do much for our own… but perhaps… this is all from what little is written in Lamarck’s biological monograph, you understand.”

 

“How long can it take you to grease your pole?”

 

And then Fitzjames had stared at him, truly confused, and then horrified, and then – Francis could feel it in the sense, softly appearing like a sunrise – terribly tender.

 

“The fucking Royal Navy and their fucking English Gentlemen,” Fitzjames spat out, and took his coat off.

 

-

 

There is a ridge of ice like a wall at the coast of King William Island, with no way round, and despite the just discernible tracks of the advance party over it, it is scarcely believable that such a thing can be surmounted.

 

The men are scared, as they have been well taught to be, of anything that might surprise them out here. Even quite simply scared of the exertion of climbing it, should it be that it is a wasted effort.

 

“We shall go first,” Francis announces to them. “Myself and Captain Fitzjames.”

 

They move slowly. Francis absolutely insisted Shelagh wait for them, and for a team to lift her with the supplies, below, but Horatio has scrambled up alongside, though his concern for Shelagh distracts him.

 

James’ body is aching all over; Francis can feel it in his own chest. He would have spared the man this if he could, but he does not think that the climb will be in vain. He is almost sure what they’ll see, when they reach the top.

 

And there it is. And he is able to experience James’ pleasure at the sight of Lt Little’s camp.

 

“Even the flag’s up!” James exclaims. His skin looks rather the worse, in the bright sunlight, but at this moment he is smiling. “We didn’t need to worry, Francis,” he says, and clasps him by the arm.

 

A few minutes earlier, cresting the final feet of the ridge, Francis had offered James his hand, telling himself it was practical to do so.

 

He cannot think of James’ hands and be quite normal, any more, let alone touch them without emotion.

 

Standing here, the first welcome sight in years before them, Francis feels James nudging at him in the sense, trying to link them again, and cannot help but draw away, shy of exposure as a snail.

 

 _And with slightly less backbone_ , he thinks, solely to himself, before he calls down the order for the rest of the party to follow.

 

-

 

Lt Little has made an excellent camp, all things considered, and Francis tells him so in the sense, alongside brief but sincere words, as they pace the perimeter together.

 

 _Pride_ comes through in response from him, and from Crécy – nothing more nuanced than that, but Francis can see the man standing just a little straighter. 

 

“If we have luck finding game,” Francis continues meanwhile, “we can spend several weeks here. It would be best to tamp down every trace of illness before continuing.”

 

Even now, he knows that James is sleeping, exhausted, Shelagh curled up beside him. There must be fresh meat soon, there absolutely must.

 

“Yes, sir. Crécy has been very active in trying to scent trails, he informs me that the wolves will be more than ready to begin forays on land – I think, sir, that he’s rather relishing the prospect. I had not considered, I admit, what we were taking from them, that is to say the Navy, using them the way we do, and not letting them hunt. This seems far more natural.”

 

Francis conceals his amusement. “There are many things we do on habit which we do not consider, perhaps.”

 

“Perhaps so. And obviously the need is greater than ever. It was a hard trip even for the halest of my party. I for one never want to feel ice under my boots again. If we make it out of this, the men all deserve medals in gold.”

 

“If we make it out of this, the men deserve every gold thing there is. Tell me, did you sight anything on your trip?”

 

“We saw no signs of the creature, if that’s your question.”

 

“What of hunters? Netsilik people?”

 

Little is shaking his head sadly even as Marine Sergeant Tozer approaches them both with an air of determination, and rippling something at the edge of the sense that Francis does not like. Crécy puts himself between Tozer and his brother, which says a great deal, and Francis wonders if Tozer knows enough to know that.

 

“The perimeter’s drawn now, sirs, but it’s not loaded.”

 

Little frowns. “What do you mean, Simon?”

 

“I’d like to recommend arming some additional men. Even with our camp tightly pitched, I’m concerned about how large our perimeter is. We’re only eight marines now and it would be a help to us to bolster up our numbers, armed.”

 

Francis watches the man closely as he suggests names – as though he had given the matter only light and recent thought - Armitage, Crispe, Manson, Seeley, Coombes and Hickey, with Hickey thrown in as if a casual addition, and in no way central to the scheme.

 

 _Threat_ , Francis hears Crécy telling Little. Or at least between the two of them there are probably more words, but the gist comes through clear enough.

 

And yet what has actually happened? A man has tried to recommend a strategy to best defend their camp, and has suggested a group of men who, it must be said, are among the least ill of the crew and thus sensible enough choices. That the wolves are uneasy counts little more than a man saying in a court of law he acted on the proof of instinct.

 

Some of those whose names Tozer has suggested may have no idea what is being planned. If, indeed, anything is at all.

 

And they are so vulnerable out here, so absolutely dependent on each other.

 

So much better, and usually far easier, to prevent mutiny than cure it.

 

Francis must keep things calm.

 

“It’s a waxing moon tonight, coming into full,” he observes, his tone light but serious. “We’ll be able to see in every direction. If something comes hunting us there’ll be time to ring the alarm and arm more men even from sleep. This site was well chosen.” He looks at Little again at this last, tips his head. “It’s going to be difficult to surprise us on such level ground, wouldn’t you say Sergeant?”

 

Tozer doesn’t look happy, but neither does he press his case further. He’s a sensible man, and whatever his part in any schemes Francis feels fairly certain it is pragmatic and impersonal. This man simply wishes to survive. Francis struggles to blame anyone for that.

 

“We can revisit this,” Francis assures him further, “but for the moment the armoury is closed past arms for marines and officers.”

 

“Aye sir.”

 

Tozer leaves them, and Little clears his throat. “I can understand why he asks it.”

 

“The reason is sound,” Francis agrees. “Some of those names are not. You heard your brother.”

 

“As did you, sir?”

 

“As did I, Lieutenant, yes.”

 

“Crécy is… with the cubs coming, I think he is more cautious, even than usual. He has never been the boldest wolf, as you know. But you feel there is something in his fears, now?”

 

“I do. But this is to be expected, I think, in a time and a place like this. Many of the men will have those kinds of thoughts, thoughts of how much longer our supplies would last if they had only to feed a smaller group, for example. It is our task to ensure it stays thoughts only. I’m relying on you, Edward.” Francis reaches out to clasp his shoulder.

 

There is a sound of paws moving rapidly on gravel; Horatio coming to them, to Crécy, alarmed by what he has heard in the sense.

 

 _Simmer down,_ Francis tells him. _Think of your brother and my sister. Don’t fret so loudly you disturb their sleep, it won’t help anything._

 

Horatio sits down on the gravel, raising a small dust cloud, and huffs, unhappy. He is very conscious of James and of Shelagh and what they need and how vulnerable they are, he informs Francis, and there is nothing he can do about any of it and it is upsetting and he is the alpha male and he ought to be able to fix everything.

 

Francis goes to scratch at his neck in heartfelt sympathy. _Would that it was so._

 

 _Meat_. Francis tells him. _That is the best answer we have to anything, right now_. He opens his mind to Crécy as well, and casts the words further through the sense; this is message anyone with the wit to hear must know. _We must have meat._

 

-

 

“I was taught this in Shanghai,” Fitzjames had been explaining, tone somewhat distracted. “I had been the to the theatre, you see, to hear their version of opera, which is quite extraordinary – hard to describe, I wish one could purchase such a thing on one of those metal discs for the music player, there are all manner of drums and the plucking of strings, and the singing is something from another world.”

 

“God fucking dammit, James,” Francis had struggled to catch his breath and speak levelly, he was caught somewhere between aggravation and laughter. “I’m to hear another of your tales? Now?”

 

Both in his ear and through the sense, he was aware of Fitzjames chuckling – for that man had felt, in turn, that Francis meant no true insult by it, and was only impatient, impatient as his sister was starting to be, wanting in tune with her as he could not remember ever wanting before.

 

They had arranged themselves on Francis’ bunk, folded into it somehow, Francis nearly naked and half-sitting, half-lying and Fitzjames stripped to his vest and underdrawers and perched on the edge and at an angle to him, the more easily to reach between Francis’ legs and set about his self-appointed task.

 

Deeply undignified, but the doors were open now, Shelagh and Horatio dancing and courting happily in the next room, growing ever more delighted and desirous with the scent of each other, and it had been hard through that to worry about something as human as absurdity.

 

Years of naval service, of shared living in small ships, eroded inhibitions somewhat as it was, and practical skills were often learnt by example - Fitzjames had compared what he was about to do to teaching another fellow to tie a bowline knot. But Francis did not recall that process ever being quite as… engaging, as this.

 

“I am trying to enlighten you, as I was enlightened then.” Fitzjames’ fingers were chapped and callused as the next man’s, but his nails neatly trimmed as always and his moves were gentle, gliding in the warmed grease he worked in Francis’ most sensitive of areas.

 

“The Chinese having operas about buggery now do they?” Francis shifted a little, trying not to gasp. It felt… he was linked in to Shelagh, of course, and wanting with all her wanting, aching, emptiness, but this felt… this was something extraordinary on its own, in his own body, in the growing heaviness in his prick that somehow fed off being touched _there._ He could… he could imagine wanting to be filled, wanting…

 

“No indeed.” Fitzjames cleared his throat. He was hard in his smalls as well, prick pressing out the cotton. And unlike all those other commanders, who had thought of their wives – or of women who were most decidedly not their wives, Francis had heard it all - this was about as far from ignoring that it would be Francis at the other end of his pleasure as Francis could imagine. “No, the relevance of opera is the singer who played the role of the princess in the story.”

 

“And what did she do, pray?”

 

“She was a man. They always are, to be allowed on the stage, in that part of the world.”

 

“A man singing a princess? That must have been – oh! No, proceed, I’m… yes, yes that is fine. That, uh, must have been rather gruff, would it not be?”

 

“He was castrato. Sang like an angel.” And Fitzjames took a moment to cradle Francis’ stones, illustrative and breath-taking.

 

Fitzjames was breathing hard as well. Now that would be a way to shut the man up, Francis considered half-wildly, if he could only level the playing field here. Shifting his weight so that he could lean forward, Francis put his own hand boldly between Fitzjames’ thighs, cupping him through the cotton, and was gratified to see him gasp. And yes, to feel the rigid, hot hardness of him. To think _he wants me as much as that._

 

 _Wanting us_ , Shelagh commented. She and Horatio were still play-fighting – there had been the sound of something falling off a table, indeed, minutes earlier, but it had been a metallic clatter rather than a smash of glass and Francis couldn’t care. _They would die to have us,_ she said, smug, _they would kill to have us._

 

“A eunuch, then, you were saying?” Francis prompted, and palmed Fitzjames again, unable not to laugh a little. “Did he still have one of these?”

 

“Most certainly. But he, uh…” Fitzjames hung his head a moment. “Francis, I cannot get these drawers too dirty, my steward struggles to wash things as it is with such limited hot water. Will you pardon me if I pause a moment to take them off?”

 

“Your hands are a little greasy, if you recall. Here, I shall loosen them for you and then you can step out of them.”

 

They broke apart and did so, and Francis took his vest off for good measure; his skin was prickling warm and suddenly aching to be touched.

 

Fitzjames, though, remained in his undershirt. 

 

“This singer, then…” Fitzjames began, reaching for him once more, but Francis caught his hands, stilling them.

 

He could not recall their having touched hand to hand since their introduction on their day of first meeting, and that had been cold enough.

 

Now, slow, he shifted them, palm to palm, and then let their fingers interlock.

 

He had never thought to do such a thing with a man. But Fitzjames was with him, here with him to journey through this together, and it was not awful, and Francis had never laughed before, as a heat came on, never felt his blood sing and hum in his skin like this.

 

In the great cabin, Horatio had caught Shelagh under him, which was at that moment precisely where she wanted to be.

 

“I am here,” Francis said, either out loud, or in the sense, he wasn’t sure anymore. “I am content to be here. It was… I have never had any man before offer me a choice.”

 

“I would gladly kill the men from before,” Fitzjames told him earnestly, and this time when he reached, Francis let him, let him come closer and touch, and touch, and touch.

 

-

 

Their first night in Terror camp proper, and Francis is roused from his tent – his own tent, now, a large one, him and Shelagh rattling round in it – by a wave of pain so intense that it seems likely to split his head open.

 

Outside, in the central open area they have created in the middle of the camp, Francis finds poor John Morfin on his knees. Bridgens and Goodsir either side of him, pleading.

 

And Francis feels it, a horrid sick surge, before the man moves, darting to grab a gun.

 

“Do not shoot!” Francis tells the men, and makes himself step forward despite the pounding behind his eyes. If this is Morfin’s sense, invading his own, then no wonder the poor man has become desperate. What has caused this – the lead poisoning? The scurvy? Some other malady any man might come by, but in Morfin’s case has been the double bad luck to arrive here?

 

But many things can be mended.

 

“You must try everything, John.” Francis takes another step, hands held out. The memory of Dr Stanley, and of how that sad affair ended, are dancing phantoms beside the reality before him now. “You’ll never get back to Gainsborough unless you try everything.”

 

Morfin keeps looking to the side. Francis realises with a cold thud that it is to where James is standing, James who ought to be sleeping, not standing out here in the cold putting himself in danger.

 

Francis can sense Morfin, and so perhaps Morfin can sense in return, even through his pain, the person here for whom Francis would kill any man in a heartbeat.

 

Morfin raises his gun.

 

Francis raises his hands. Takes a breath.

 

And Shelagh walks between them.

 

Shelagh, her belly swinging just that little bit with the weight of her cubs, walks out onto the gravel in front of Morfin, and into the path of Morfin’s musket.

 

Her head is back and high, proud and imperious. She dips and weaves as always to compensate for her missing foot, but her gaze does not falter.

 

Unlike Stanley, Morfin has no wolf who will fight for him to the end. But Stanley didn’t have a gun.

 

Francis can hear Horatio’s fear, and James trying to discern which way to shoot, and Crécy and the others catching it and their terror, which before long will trip into the men and someone will fire, someone has to fire soon…

 

Except that the next thing he hears is Shelagh.

 

 _Hush_ , Shelagh says into the sense. It is completely without sound and also so loud that even the invalids in the hospital tent must hear it.

 

Everyone freezes where they stand.

 

 _Hush_ , she says again, more softly. She is still walking towards John Morfin.

 

Morfin’s arms drop to his sides. The gun is loose in his grip now.

 

_Hush._

 

He goes to his knees, falling straight down, head hanging. And then he carefully lies down on the gravel, curling up his knees like a child. He is sobbing gently.

 

_Hush._

 

She has reached Morfin. She goes to his head and licks his cheek, then moves so that her side presses against him. The cubs, the wriggling cubs inside her warm against his skin through her white, white fur.

 

Very slowly, Francis approaches in turn. Crouching, he takes the musket from Morfin’s loose grip.

 

The man is breathing more levelly now, still crying but calmly, if such a thing is possible. Some of the creases are smoothed from his face, and Francis realises that he cannot hear the pain as he could before.

 

 _Hush_ , says Shelagh, kind. _I am here._

 

“Dr Goodsir,” Francis murmurs, when he has handed the musket back to Sergeant Tozer, when he is able to speak out of his panic-dry mouth. “Please fetch that coca wine that you were speaking of. I have no idea how long she can do this.”

 

-

 

Francis lies in his tent, on his makeshift bed, his wolf beside him. He’s the one rubbing Shelagh’s belly now; the cubs only started moving today, she tells him, it was fortuitous.

 

 _Risky_ , he observes, and presses his face into her flank, breathing deeply, shaking as the tension finally releases.

 

She shifts over – harder and harder for her to get comfortable, as over days and weeks she swells and grows tender – but then moves to bring them close again.

 

 _No more dying_ , she tells him firmly.

 

 _No more dying_ , he agrees. He can feel Horatio listening companionably from the next tent over.

 

And he can feel James sleeping, and all the aches of James’ body that the man himself will, at least for now, be blessedly insensible of.

 

John Morfin is sedated, and for the present they have been able to help him. But John Morfin’s state is how they will all be, soon enough, unless Francis can think of something.

 

-

 

Francis had never been accustomed to getting any actual sleep, during a mating. Anxiety, pain and shame usually prevented anything but the most fleeting doze, driven by pure exhaustion.

 

But he had found himself waking in his bunk, sometime after the first flush of Shelagh’s heat starting, scarcely even sore and with a delightful looseness to his limbs, a wrung-out sort of peace suffusing his whole body.

 

And there, beside him, was… James.

 

It was James, now. Somewhere in the last hours something had fixed, crystallised in the sense, and Francis looked at his second in command and saw… James. And even that name was only a signifier for something else, a scent name that Francis could not translate beyond that one word.

 

James was asleep, still, as were the wolves in the great cabin.

 

Catching sight of the pitcher of water across the room, and becoming suddenly conscious of extreme thirst, Francis made himself shift to it, swinging out of the bunk and making the short journey to retrieve a glass.

 

It was only as he looked back that he saw.

 

James had become naked – all the clothes they had been wearing the last time that Francis had a clear memory of were now strewn about the cabin – and his skin was very pale.

 

All except where three dark purple bruises were crawling over his chest.

 

Perhaps sensing the gaze, James shifted, eyes opening to blink up at him.

 

“What is this?” Francis asked him, voice hushed in deference to the wolves. And not purely out of consideration – once the wolves were awake and about it again, their two brothers would have no hope of being able to maintain a sensible conversation.

 

“What? Oh.” James looked down at himself, at the marks. He betrayed absolutely no surprise. Francis wanted to cuff him round the ear. “You know what this is. You’ve heard the story enough times.”

 

“Your Chinese sniper? James, that was years ago!”

 

“Well this is how the thing goes, I believe.” Looking up again, James met his eye, licked his lips. “I say, I’ll take a glass of water while you’re up, if you don’t mind.”

 

“Have you seen one of the doctors about this?”

 

“What for? There’s nothing more they can do for me than for anyone else, and I’m far from the worst off.”

 

“But you’re…” Francis bit his tongue.

 

“Others are in greater need than me, Francis.”

 

“I need you!” Francis turned around, filled the glass again. For a moment he let himself wait there, his back to the bunk.

 

It might have been the volume at which he spoke, or the intensity of the emotion, or just happenstance, but he heard Shelagh shifting, whining a little, beyond the wall. She too went to her bowl, thirsty. It was far from her only yearning.

 

“When we… they’re nearly back to it,” Francis tried to keep his tone brisk, to return to the professional dignity with which he had intended they should weather this. He set his shoulders, brought the refilled glass over to the bunk. “How best can we plan what we must do in order to avoid hurting you further?”

 

“Francis this is the best I’ve felt in years.” James stretched out his long limbs, sinuous and sensual, and arranged his hands behind his head. Then he frowned. “What about you, though? Are you well?”

 

“I am intending to write a letter of commendation to your Chinese singer. A most excellent teacher.” Francis took the empty glass back, returned it to its place.

 

James tipped his head. “Alas, he is no longer with us. But I think he would have appreciated the sentiment.”

 

“I am sorry. Was he… Were you particularly close?”

 

“At one time. Not latterly.” James shifted, looked away. “Oh yes, I see what you mean…” The wolves had sent a new wave of lust into the sense, thick and heady. James was hardening, his cock growing and reddening; noticing it, Francis felt a strange twisting heat in his own belly. “If you’ll allow me, I should probably ready you again.”

 

“Allowed,” Francis said dryly, and climbed back up to him.

 

-

 

“Hunting parties begin today,” Francis tells his assembled officers. They are in the largest of the tents at the camp, seated at a table someone has by great effort dragged here across the frozen miles, the better to preserve the niceties of rank. “One south, one east, and each party will have two officers and four mixed men. Lady Silence, Dr Goodsir and the wolves will set off meanwhile in a separate body, being used to hunt as one group. In time, perhaps we can mix these groupings, depending on how we are most successful.”

 

“And if we are unable to find game, sir?” Irving asks.

 

 _Then we are almightily fucked, you idiot_ , Francis thinks, but keeps that to himself.

 

“Then we will proceed as we have, Lieutenant, and keep moving south.”

 

“I’ll take south,” Little volunteers. “Lt. Irving can take east.”

 

Francis shakes his head. “You’ll stay in camp with Commander Fitzjames and myself. We need to start planning the fresh-water parties.”

 

“That leaves only three lieutenants, sir. You said two per team, did you not?”

 

Francis grins. He has been looking forward to this.

 

“Because it is needed, and because it is deserved, I am making a promotion this morning. An emergency measure, if you will, but one that is wholly sincere.” He looks around them at the table, enjoying their suspense, even as he reaches for his pen and ink to write the order.

 

“To my knowledge this has never been done. But then, much of what we are now doing has never been done.”

 

James is amused by this in particular, and Francis pushes back at him in the sense almost playfully; his plans for this meeting have had him in a good mood all morning.

 

At Francis’ feet, Shelagh rolls over and pants, happy despite a morning bout of dyspepsia.

 

He passes James his order, and feels the surprise and quick approval James experiences on seeing the name he has written. “Someone on this expedition has earned our trust, respect and confidence in a way that merits absolute a place at this table,” Francis concludes.

 

James signs and hands the order back, but Francis returns it. He wants to watch this play out. “James?” he suggests. _Will you do the honours?_

_You are enjoying this_ , James diagnoses, but he is grinning himself.

 

And James, bless the man, plays up to the very last, striding purposefully to the tent opening as if he is to search the whole camp, before turning and holding out the paper to the waiting Jopson.

 

In seconds all the men are laughing, at Jopson’s face as much as anything, glad to have something unexpected to exclaim over that is in no way calamitous.

 

Francis is delighted to see Jopson’s happiness, and to feel it sparking to flame, illuminating them all. They all need something to smile about.

 

But it is James’ face, James’ smile, James’ emotion that Francis cannot help but return his attention to.

 

Once he would have said Commander James Fitzjames was a man solely concerned with advancement as it pertained to himself, and his own interest. But James has enjoyed giving this moment to Jopson. Has appreciated it because he knows – Francis can feel it, can half hear the memories even as James meets his eye – how it is to expect no kind of recognition, to be forever on the outside, scraping at a window to be let in.

 

Even without such knowledge, Francis is afraid he would still wish to watch James smile forever.

 

-

 

Shelagh’s heat had lasted into a third day, and towards the end of it Francis was thinking of nothing so much as sleep, and of an uninterrupted meal, even if it were of Goldner’s patent tinned tomato and beef stew with lead by way of croutons. He and James had been eating the biscuits, weevils and all, when they could, and pieces of chocolate, but nothing warm or requiring any amount of preparation.

 

James was the more exhausted of the two of them, he knew. And this was unsurprising perhaps, even leaving aside the implications of those marks on his chest (and how Francis wanted to set that aside, to not know of it when he was so helpless to assist), given that of the two of them he'd adopted the more active role. Whilst Francis had been able to lie back and sweat and gasp and clutch at the bed sheets, James had been the one on his knees over him, keeping that sweet steady sway of his hips in a rhythm Francis was starting know...

 

The heat might be ending but it was not yet over, and Francis blamed this for the tenor his thoughts were still taking, and the once more building ache between his thighs as he thought them. 

 

James was prone beside him in the bunk, half asleep, half awake, and groaned a little, sharing the feeling of renewed arousal; the protest did not sound entirely facetious.

 

 _Water?_ Francis asked, and only realised after James nodded that he'd not spoken aloud.

 

 _Aren't you tired?_ Francis asked the wolves in turn, who were sniffing and licking each other yet again, their eagerness still a steady flame, as excited as if they’d never met before rather than spent the better part of thirty-six hours barely an inch apart.

 

They ignored him.

 

Returning with the glass, Francis got a better look at the skin of James’ back. There were new marks there, finger print sized bruises on his shoulder, and Francis winced.

 

 _What’s the matter?_ James turned over and then frowned, putting a hand to his lips, clearly confused.

 

“What’s the matter?” he repeated, speaking aloud this time.

 

“Perhaps I don’t know my own strength,” Francis told him. “I am most sorry, I should have been more cautious.”

 

“I’m prepared to bet that’s the first time you’ve said that in your life,” James observed, and chuckled. “Come now, nothing to be sorry about. I know how it is now. My God, I know. I’m impressed that we’ve remembered to eat at all. We have eaten, haven’t we? Feels almost like we haven’t.”

 

He was jocular, but his muscles were very sore, undoubtedly. Francis could feel it clear. And starting to ache and tense again at the same time, just as Francis was – the call of the wolves was rising in both of them, whether they wanted it or not.

 

Francis sat down on the bunk edge. It was odd to be so comfortable, with regard to temperature and to social ease, being naked around another person. He had always felt self-conscious with Sophia, acutely aware of the man he was not.

 

“One doesn’t know until one does it – a wolf heat, I mean.” Francis sighed. “It’s not like anything humans do. It’s not the same for them, they don’t… After this they’ll have no interest in each other, in the sexual sense, for another twelve months. They pack it all into this one burst. And it isn’t easy.”

 

James dragged himself to sit upright. He raised an eyebrow, grin gone wry. “I would be offended at your concerns over my prowess, Francis, were it not that I have, by my count, exerted myself six times already in this matter.” A wince passed over his face as he moved.

 

Distressed, Francis couldn’t help but turn away, only to find his hand caught and clasped in James’.

 

“Not an unpleasant exertion. Not in the slightest. But a man can have too much of anything. Even cake.”

 

_Cake?_

 

_Don’t laugh, I am offering a delicate allusion._

 

 _Perhaps, then…_ Francis stopped. Better to speak words, if he was to be sure of being clear. He swallowed, hesitant, but James looked so weary. “Perhaps then, a change in diet?”

 

James tilted his head.

 

Francis picked up the pot of grease from the little shelf where it had been left. They had used a very great deal more of the stuff than he had been used to in previous years, and it was three-quarters empty, but there was still enough, he thought.

 

“Let me lend you a hand?” Francis offered.

 

Despite all that had already passed between them, James went a very charming shade of red. “Will that be enough to keep us in pace with the wolves?”

 _Will you survive much else_ , Francis wanted to shoot back at him, but instead affected a grin.

 

“Only one way to find out, James. Let us be explorers in this too.”

 

“The wonders of scientific inquiry,” said James, deadpan, but he shifted again a little, letting Francis fit into the space beside him, turning so that they were face to face.

 

It was intimate, in some ways even more so than the fucking. Side by side like this, arms rubbing against each other as they reached for each other, stroking up and down.

 

He could feel James’ breath on his face, warm.

 

Nowhere to look but into James’ eyes, the deep, dark pools of them. The kind of eyes that consumptive poets put into odes; Francis didn’t have those words himself, but he could feel, oh, so much…

 

And then James bit his lip, which was a terrible idea, for he would bleed to be sure, and Francis had no hands free to stop him and knew that he must, and did the only thing that he could, the only thing he absolutely should not have done, which was to lean in, and to bring his mouth to James’.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Officially the longest thing I've ever written! And also officially finished *g* Thank you for your patience and so many thanks to those who've been commenting along the way \o/ 
> 
> **Warning note:** Please note addition of 'animal birth' tag - if you want a heads up on how that goes or what's onscreen feel free to ask me in comments here or on tumblr (same username)

The hunting parties depart soon after the meagre plate of mess that makes for their lunch – little more than a mush of ships biscuits and hot water, rendered additionally disgusting by vinegar, the camp’s sole remaining antiscorbutic. Liberally spiced with weevils as well, of course.

 

Whatever glad distraction there was at the promotion this morning, Francis must now look once more over his charts, and return to the grim reality of their position.

 

They have moved from ship to camp. So far all that has achieved is the loss of their best shelter.

 

This Terror Camp, indeed, is not so far from where Lt. Gore’s lead party travelled, twelve months and a lifetime ago. Francis has no wish to draw anyone’s attention – even his own - to this, but it does mean they are fairly near the message cairn at Victory Point.

 

If any person from Britain has already bestirred themselves to go in search of Sir John Franklin’s expedition, then they might well think to visit that cairn. There is just the faintest possibility that some note or instruction may already have been left there.

 

On the other hand, it was well publicised – by Sir John, or rather by Lady Jane, for whom Francis has ever less love - that the expedition had ample food for five years. No one may think it needful to consider Erebus and Terror over-due in their arrival in the Pacific until about 1850.

 

Nonetheless, Francis had thought of visiting the cairn today. But he knows James spent a bad night, waking breathless, and every joint of him sore. The man is in desperate need of softer bedding, and the fact that half of the camp are in the same state does not stop Francis quietly transferring one of his own under-blankets to James’ tent when the man is visiting the trench latrine.

 

A trip to Victory Point, could James manage the two miles there and back, might well be cheering.

 

Would make an opportunity for conversation, without the constant possibility of being overhead that besets a small camp where no wall is made of anything thicker than canvas.

 

He and James can converse in the sense, it is true, but that is still new, and there is the risk of confusion.

 

And they need to talk. They must understand each other.

 

Not just as a first and second in command must communicate, but as two men.

  
Two men who have strayed somehow into something uncharted.

 

There was the journey to prepare for, through the end of March and the start of April – that is how Francis justifies his reticence thus far to himself. And then of course they were on the journey, and that made for the whole of their pre-occupations.

 

But they are in camp now, and there are things that they have still never spoken of.

 

When they had woken together in Francis’ bed, Shelagh’s heat finally burnt through, they did not speak. At the time, Francis had not felt any particular need to – at the time, the sense was yet running clear between them and all emotion had seemed straightforward, and quite mutually understood, in that wordless way of the sense which never translates to memory.

 

James had shaken Francis’ hand, in bidding farewell that day, and had appeared to realise even as he did so that it was not quite the right thing – the scene would have been awkward, almost comical, had anyone been watching.

 

But Francis too had been exhausted, it had been beyond his power to save the moment, and he could only smile apologetically and close his cabin door behind both James and Horatio, all too ready for more sleep, feeling it would be simple enough to pick up again when next they met.

 

And at their next meeting – a gathering of officers three days later - James had been just as he ever had. Or at least, as he had begun to be - convivial, intelligent, kind, friendly.

 

In short: James had acted as though nothing between them had changed.

 

Perhaps for him, it had not.

 

Once Francis would have counted that, from a man who had accompanied him through a heat, as the very best and most desirable state of affairs.

 

Sighing now, Francis casts down his pen and rubs a hand over his brow. Instinctively, he checks his fingers, after, but he is not bleeding from his hairline, not yet.

 

Sitting back in his chair, he opens his mind to the hunting parties. He can feel the wolves most clearly, of course, on their foray with Lady Silence and Dr Goodsir, all but Shelagh who has been unable to talk anyone round to letting her join.

 

Silence had not been especially confident of finding anything anyway – an unusually cold winter, according to her, and the caribou calves and baby seals would have been less likely to survive to be ready to die now in the cause of feeding them all. Still, the wolves are enjoying running as a pack again, that much is clear.

 

Jopson and Hodgson headed south with their four men. Separated from Leo, Hodgson is noticeably hard to read – Francis can hear more from Jopson, if anything. But Hodgson had always kept somewhat to himself.

 

And Hodgson did not approve of Jopson’s field promotion, earlier, Francis suspects. Which was one reason that Francis had chosen to send them out in the same party today – best that they both adjust to their new relative positions as quickly as possible.

 

To the east, Irving and Le Vesconte are getting tired – Francis can tell that well enough. Their way has been harder going, it would appear, or certainly they have found it so, and disillusionment is growing. They are hungry – everyone in the crew is hungry, and that permeates every thought like a stain seeping through cloth.

 

“You have failed, in your calculations, to account for the fact that you are now without a steward.”

 

Francis opens his eyes. “If you want a cup of tea, James, the pot is right there and I am sure Mr Diggle will oblige us with a little melt-water from his stove now that Lt Little’s team have been so good as to procure it for us.”

 

“Thank you,” James says dryly. He is wrapped up in a comforter and welsh wig although it is balmy enough by the standards of the Arctic Circle, his arms wrapped tight around himself. “Will you also allow me to make you one?”

 

“Most kind.” Francis gives half a bow. He wonders if he is being foolish, if James thinks that he is.

 

There is no one immediately around them, at this precise moment. No one to see or overhear them but Shelagh, who has better things on her mind.

 

“The only foodstuff in which I have not yet lost faith is tea.” James has gone into the entrance of Francis’ tent, and there comes the sound clinking crockery as he assembles a tray. Francis is aware of Shelagh rising from her blankets and going to butt affectionately at James’ legs – _gently_ , Francis implores her.

 

Is he right in sensing that James is tense, tenser than his demeanour would betray? Although in fairness that might be for any number of reasons, including the all the many aches in his poor, beleaguered body.

 

Or fear, of what his commanding officer might ask of him. Men who abuse their power in that way are beneath contempt, and Francis can believe that James may have met such, in his time, a handsome young man with little influence as he was. The mere thought of what is between them being anything like that it is unbearable.

 

But then, Francis has never imagined he could feel anything for a man in the vein of emotion he had experienced with, for example, Miss Cracroft. Had thought the business of men with men was always one of violence and exploitation, or at best of making do.

 

When James had spoken of his opera singer, he had not sounded like a person regretting the loss of only a convenient release. His eyes had been downcast, his lips thin.

 

“Perhaps if they locate a nursing caribou today, we’ll even have milk.” Francis is quite certain he is speaking nonsense now.

 

“Perhaps…” James begins, and stops.

 

Francis feels it too. Echoing through the sense - something fine, something joyful, something marvellous.

 

“Game, do you think? Have they found some? Can you tell, Francis?”

 

“It is Irving,” Francis says, “but I cannot… It’s something he’s pleased about but it might… sometimes memories can come through and seem…”

 

He doesn’t want to raise unfounded expectations, James’ or his own. He can’t allow himself to believe in the possibility of a miracle.

 

All the same, the way that Irving is apparently feeling…

 

Francis tries, carefully, to reach through the sense and ask the man about it, but they have not enough of a link between them for that, and he continues simply to feel it for several minutes, a steady stream of something terribly like hope. Le Vesconte joins, more weakly; both of them cannot be mistaken, surely?

 

“Francis,” James is saying. His face is so pale. His lips are scabbed. He ought to be rubbing oil to them – Francis has some in his tent, could go and retrieve it. After all, if by miracle their fortunes have turned there may not be so long, in which to….

 

James screams. Falls to his knees.

 

There is crash, a cup smashing.

 

It is only by long familiarity with riding the sense that Francis does not collapse himself.

 

For everything has changed, a coin flipping, a page turning.

 

Joy to sorrow, relief to fear, hope to despair to nothing, nothing, _nothing._

 

And pain, so much pain that Francis could double over with it.

 

 _Le Vesconte! Irving!_ he cries out, even as he scrambles to James’ side.

 

And hears, alongside his own exclamations, the sudden horrified panic of a wolf – of Pisces, it is Pisces he can hear - Pisces, separated from his brother across the different hunting parties and running, running, running over the gravelly ground of this island as fast as ever he can, not caring how the pads of his feet are bruised and cut, not caring that he can barely breathe, trying…

 

Other wolves are moving with him – they have heard it too. They are distressed, dismayed, but it is nothing to what Pisces feels.

 

Shelagh makes a sound such as Francis has never heard. Agonised. She vomits her morning food onto the ground.

 

Hobbled by the horror of it, Francis helps James into the nearest chair, cautious of knocking his fragile skin, clumsy with the second-hand distress and his own at the sight of James like this.

 

“Francis,” James is murmuring. He sounds almost mindless. “Francis, what can possibly...?”

 

Francis has gone to his knees. He takes James’ hand in his without thinking.

 

And then forces himself to put it down, and to stand, for the noise James made has attracted attention and others in the camp are hurrying up to them, alarmed. Thomas Blanky, struggling on his peg leg and Lt Little, and Sergeant Tozer, his weapon raised and ready.

 

“At least one of the officers in the east party is dead,” Francis whispers to James’ ear. “But we must wait, and make sure these men wait too, until someone comes back and tells us more. We have no idea what is out there.”

 

Briefly, acknowledging, James’ fingers brush his own. Francis tears himself away to address the crowd.

 

-

 

Every member of the east hunting party is lost.

 

It was not the creature that killed them, or anything or anyone unknown.

 

It was Cornelius Hickey.

 

So Pisces reports, broadcasting the memory through the sense in a sickening loop without even being asked. Pisces had arrived at the scene, breathless and straining, having run as fast as ever he could, to find his brother on the ground, blood spilling too fast to staunch with any amount of licking, and Hickey holding the knife.

 

And then Pisces had killed Hickey. His muzzle is still red with blood, his long, sharp teeth rimed with gore. He moves like a lost lamb.

 

Ethelred is not speaking at all. He froze, so Lady Silence and Dr Goodsir report, right in the middle of their hunt. He did not run. He sat down, in fact, collapsed against the ground quite suddenly; it was the first any of them knew anything was wrong. They had still been trying to attend him when Pisces had set off running.

 

“Judging by the wounds, Hickey surprised Lt Le Vesconte from behind, and cut his throat.” Dr Goodsir’s voice is steady, his tone carefully professional, but his hands are shaking a little. “I suspect he knew nothing of it, until suddenly it came. That may be why Ethelred reacted as he did.” He takes a shuddering breath, rubs his hands together – he has just dragged Ethelred back to the camp on the small sledge Lady Silence had prepared for transporting any game they killed.

 

But neither they, nor the south party, have caught anything.

 

“How can Hickey have thought he would get away with this, sir? What can he have hoped to achieve by it?”

 

Francis stares at him. Goodsir’s distress seems amplified by his lack of understanding, as though a clear purpose would make Hickey’s act any more forgivable.

 

“Hickey kept himself separate from the pack, as much as he could,” Francis tells him gently. “Indeed, I’ve never known a sailor of such long service as he claimed be so unreceptive to it. He may not have truly comprehended how clearly Pisces would hear from Lt. Irving, or had any sense of how close the wolves were, such that Pisces could reach him before he had a chance to further arm himself. As to why – from what we’ve known of the man, I am sure he had seen some profit in it.”

 

“It might have been the lead poisoning afflicting his mind, I suppose, as with Dr Stanley?”

 

“It might.” Francis concedes. He can feel how little Goodsir believes that. And at the same time how much Goodsir wants it to be true – wanted all the evils besetting them explained away by chemical imbalance, rather than by being merely the nature of men.

 

It has been many, many decades since Francis had such hopes.

 

“Before this happened,” Francis says now. “I was aware of Lt Irving feeling a sense of tremendous happiness. Did you see any sign as to why?”

 

“Happiness?” Goodsir’s eyes widen. “No, I have no idea.”

 

Francis asks the question in the sense to Lady Silence, and finds little more help in her reply. She is in any case not paying him a great deal of attention; she has carried Ethelred to her tent – no mean feat, given that he weighs at least as much as a man – and is now coaxing Pisces to follow. Her hands are gentle, never quite touching the wolf’s body but beckoning, steady.

 

 _Is this a good idea?_ Francis asks Shelagh. She, like the other wolves still in possession of a brother, has fixed herself to the side of her bonded and will not move an inch.

 

Or at least, she had made an attempt to ignore this instinct, at Francis’ request. But Pisces had snapped at her, when she tried to approach him. Turned away, when she asked him on Francis’ behalf what he had heard from his brother in those strange, unexpected moments of jubilation before the end.

 

And she understands why he shuns her; to a wolf who has lost what Pisces has lost, a wolf yet with a brother is an unbearable reminder. But that does not make it easier to bear.

 

 _I don’t know, any more_ , Shelagh tells Francis now. She has never sounded so bleak. _I don’t know how to keep them safe. My Pack._

 

Horatio whines. He is sitting a little way from them, curled at, and somewhat on top of, James’ feet and James raises an eyebrow before rising from his chair and walking slowly over to where Francis is, Horatio padding eagerly beside him and going to groom Shelagh, making little fussing noises. After a tense moment, she submits to it, rolling onto her side.

 

 _I know better than to make him choose between her, and me,_ James observes in the sense. He clears his throat. _For that reason, Francis, I think perhaps you and I should share a tent tonight. The wolves will be happier and I seem in any case to have acquired one of your blankets._

Francis has not the strength to argue.

 

-

 

They are nearly to their beds, a mournful, subdued affair in the camp tonight, all of them wearier from the task of building rock cairns over each of their dead.

 

Sergeant Tozer has been particularly quiet, for a man usually ready with an opinion. Francis is not sure what the man may have thought he’d agreed with Hickey, but is as confident as he can be without raising the topic that Tozer had not envisioned mass murder – or at least, had not realised that Hickey’s schemes might involve it, or come to the same thing in the end, out here.

 

There is scarcely any noise in the camp at all, when the sudden shout goes up from the perimeter guard.

 

“Christ if it’s that creature now I’ll throttle it myself,” James murmurs, getting up from the under the covers he had just arranged over Francis, the wolves and himself, reaching for his coat and his pistol. Francis is inclined to agree.

 

Inclined to think that at last their luck has run out, and that this will be the end; himself and James, shoulder to shoulder at the finish.

 

But waiting for them, gazing with a distinctly unimpressed expression at the guard with his musket raised, are a group of Netsilik, one of whom gives Francis a kind of bow and holds out John Irving’s telescope.

 

-

 

_June 1848_

 

James is teaching Lt Jopson to waltz.

 

It is evening, although the sun still shines, the sky bright as midday. This can throw off the rhythm of sleep just as much as the endless dark of winter, and with their improved diet the men have more energy to burn. Activities like this are quite sensible, it could be said.

 

Most of the crew are gathered around that central open area of the camp where, only two months ago, John Morfin fell to his knees and begged to die.

 

Now Morfin sits on a three-legged stool amongst his fellows, tin cup of grog in one hand, and sways in rhythm with the music, laughing.

 

The music player with its metal discs was lugged here from the ships in the first transfers and, apparently none the worse for its travails, has been induced to give out a tinny tune once dreamed up by – according to the pasted label – Luigi Boccherini, though probably not with such a scene as this in mind. The men swell the noise, singing along with the tune that three winters have made them more than familiar with.

 

They’ve never done this before, though.

 

Thomas Jopson, given his elevation to the officer class, James had argued when they’d all dined earlier, with not a little of the teasing roguishness of the man who had first sailed out of Greenhithe in 1845, would need to be able to mix with the most refined of company on their return to England. Only think of the receptions, the glorious welcome for the expedition! As such, it was a matter of immediate import that he be able to lead a young lady in the most modern of dances.

 

For Jopson is leading – James insisted upon this – and James, a blanket pinned around his waist to provide the suggestion and inconvenience of a skirt, has his hand on Jopson’s shoulder, following.

 

Idle enough entertainment, and the men are enjoying it, some coupling up and aping them – not a few, Francis fancies, studying the lesson quite seriously, imagining this ability a social grace they would do as well to be in possession of when they return home.

 

Some, perhaps, taking something else from the exercise. John Bridgens and Harry Peglar are gliding together as if the rough sandy ground were a polished floor, and if they are smiling, they are not laughing, and they quite clearly not aware of anyone else at all.

 

For Francis too, the moment is also exactly as it would be were this a society dance floor; he is seated, and alone.

 

He reaches for his evening cup of tea – Hartnell is his steward now, Jopson had insisted on someone adopting the role – and takes a moment to pick a strand of gristle from his teeth.

 

The fresh meat the Netsilik have gifted them – Francis has attempted to make payment back as best he can, but he has nothing whatsoever to offer worth even half of the value of that food – has wrought something upon them like a miracle. Men smile, now, men sing, men dance. Men speak of homecoming with belief in their eyes and in their minds; Francis can feel it from them, another kind of singing, and twice as sweet.

 

They are hungry, make no mistake – and the Netsilik are hungry too, that much is plain. It is a not a good hunting year, and the island does not usually support an extra hundred odd men. But it has been two weeks since any of his crew lost a tooth, or bled into their pillow.

 

James was one of a group who stood and strip-washed from a bucket of used cooking water a few days ago, and Francis saw then what he had already felt from the sense between them; James’ bruises are gone, the wounds again healed, his chest unmarked, his skin whole.

 

Then Francis had realised why he was watching, and had felt disgusted with himself, and had turned away.

 

Now every man apart from those stationed on the perimeter on watch are gathered watching James Fitzjames, and Francis can hide amongst them.

 

James’ hair is longer than ever, and he has loosened it down his back the better to take the female part – with great show and impish humour, which the men had adored – and where so recently it was dry and dull now it gleams, dark and glossy.

 

Not for ten thousand pounds, not for the cost of his own life, would Francis wish James to be ill again.

 

But the more beautiful James grows, the more of a fool Francis feels.

 

It has become a strange, painful, fascinating hobby to examine his memories of those early days when this crew was assembled, before their departure from England, when James had been at his most groomed, most ebullient. When the two of them had been in company together, shiny braid and medals and James the centre of all society attention, woman flowing to him like dandelion pollen on the breeze. Had this… whatever it is, this _desire_ in Francis been present even then, hidden somewhere down under the varnish of social mores? The dislike Francis had felt – had the desire been anywhere in that? Could the one emotion have fed upon the other?

 

There is another roar of laughter – Jopson has fallen over James’ feet, and not for the first time, and James is making a great pantomime of being affronted.

 

The cunning of what James is doing would fascinate Francis even without all the other reasons for him to watch it. James is treating Jopson as a peer by being willing to create such larks with him, whilst at the same time acknowledging the difference in social standing by highlighting what Jopson does not know, whilst also softening any suggestion of superiority by dint of his own antics.

 

Now the pair has broken apart – Jopson is holding up his hands, shaking his head, retreating. Around them, other partners still bob and dip and turn to the music, which is all singing now, the machine having run itself through and no one caring to go and start it up again.

 

_May I have the next, Francis?_

 

James, clear in the sense, gentle, friendly. Walking towards him. Francis stiffens in his seat.

 

_I’m not sure I could carry it off as you do. Better the men don’t see their Captain’s imitation of the beached walrus._

 

James chuckles and comes to sit down in the next chair. Horatio, who has been lying mournfully at Francis’ feet, lifts his head and huffs at him.

 

 _No sign yet, eh?_ Reaching down, James scratches at his brother’s neck. _These things take a while, I believe. Don’t worry._

 

“How does she feel to you?” he asks Francis aloud.

 

“Some little way off, still. Might well be a few days. It was like this last time, and I believe indeed it is quite usual for she-wolves – a den and then keeping herself to herself for a few days beforehand. She’ll call me if she wants me. She won’t want him, though, or any of them anywhere near. Cubs are vulnerable, when the pack is this hungry.” Horatio’s head goes up, deeply offended, and Francis holds out his hand, placating.

 

“Are vulnerable amongst the wild wolves, anyway, and instincts die hard. She knows Horatio would never do anything to hurt her or them, and yet…”

 

“To know a thing is not so, and yet fear that it is, yes, I am familiar with the principle.” Leaning back, James starts scraping his long hair back behind his ears and into its queue.

 

In the first weeks after the mating, when the sense was new between them, it had still been quite easy for Francis to know how James felt, sometimes even to hear his thoughts whether or not he intended to broadcast them. But James has learnt now, as Francis did in his time and as no doubt all bonded men do, to keep his counsel, and tell only what he chooses.

 

Such a skill is more of an art, though, and something that still makes Francis uneasy as to his own abilities. The arrival of the Netsilik, and the great uproar and flurry of hospitality it provoked, had put paid to the plan of James moving to Francis’ tent the night after the tragedy of the east party, and Francis has carefully avoided the topic since. He is not sure he could control his own thoughts, at such proximity.

 

“Francis,” James says now, looking up again, and Francis tenses to hear his tone, which is very serious.

 

James meets his gaze. “The cubs. Shelagh was so very hungry – we all were. And what we did eat had so little virtue in it. And there was the strain of the journey to the camp, and whatever she did to calm Morfin….”

 

“I don’t know,” Francis tells him frankly. “She believes all is well but… She is an optimistic creature in general, as you may have noticed. I know that the men are expecting nothing but the safe arrival of six or eight cubs for them to make great pets of, as most of them have known from other crews where this happened. It will be a blow if it does go poorly, and when we are so close to having heart again.”

 

“Forget the men,” James says, and then blinks, lowering his voice. “I mean to say… I am thinking of her. And of Horatio. And of…” he clears his throat. “We were there when they were conceived, after all. I suppose I…”

 

Francis feels very warm in his coat. He waits in case James intends to finish his sentence, and then speaks into the silence. “It can feel like that. Like they are… ours. But as you say, she was very hungry. That she is alive, that any of us are alive, is a great miracle already, James.”

 

James looks away, biting at his lip. Francis still cannot quite bear to see him do that.

 

-

 

 _Sometimes better, sometimes worse_ , Lady Silence reports, holding open the flap of her tent so Francis can see Ethelred within. _A little worse, today._

 

Francis hums his agreement. That tallies with his own and Shelagh’s awareness.

 

Inside, on a low bed strewn with furs, Ethelred’s brown coat almost vanishes into the background. He has his head on his paws, and is not asleep, although he moves very little, showing no interest in his visitors.

 

Pisces is out with Dr Goodsir, seeking edible lichens. Since the tragedy, Pisces has lost all taste for hunting game, and will no longer eat his food raw – something to do with the taboo of killing a man from the Pack, as far as Shelagh can translate for Francis – but still longs to provide, and has been convinced by Goodsir of the likely importance of such green stuffs to the men’s wellbeing. Goodsir and Silence feed him from their plates like a pet, come dinner, and he is never far from one or both of them, but Ethelred would lie here in this tent, Francis believes, even if the entire camp packed up tomorrow and started walking away.

 

Which in fact they may have to do. Not tomorrow, not until after the cubs are born, but soon.

 

Francis crouches down, resting on his heels. Closing his eyes, he reaches out as best he can in the sense, pushing reassurance, warmth, sympathy, concern… _I am here,_ he tells Ethelred. _We are here for you, still._

 

Despite her current preoccupations and the prospect of more uncomfortable waiting, Shelagh hears him from their tent, and bolsters with what she can.

 

Ethelred does not react. No movement, no sound, nothing in the sense.

 

 _Thank you for looking after him_ , Francis tells Lady Silence, as he stands again, sighing.

 

 _Some are not supposed to be alone_. She is looking at Ethelred, but Francis can feel it is not solely him of whom she speaks, and that it is not just for Ethelred that she frowns, pained.

 

He has nothing to offer her. He bows, and leaves.

 

Making his way back across the camp, he pays a visit to at least the outside of every tent. This has become his daily habit; he finds he sleeps more easily, having checked on everything with his own eyes.

 

The hospital tent has two patients presently; a marine who broke his collarbone on a ranging trip to the ice wall, and Thomas Blanky, whose leg stump took great abuse in their first great walk and during the worst of their hunger, and who has been absolutely ordered by Dr Peddie to stay in bed and with the weight off it to give it some chance to heal before they must move again. Francis passes a pleasant hour or so with Thomas and a full pipe, trading stories, before he moves on. Being assured of Thomas’ continued recovery pleases Shelagh as well.

 

The stores tent is a strange one. They still have a small mountain of canned food in the red tins, preserved in case of absolute need but avoided wherever possible. Mr Diggle has rationed their dry goods quite efficiently, and has a reasonable supply of salt, which is one of the things the Netsilik do appreciate having in return for the game they share.

 

The armoury is locked. Francis checks the padlock himself before exchanging some conversation with the marine on duty, who is also guarding their remaining spirits. He finds, now, that he can see these bottles and barrels almost without flinching. He can still feel in the marrow of his bones what it would be like to drink, and to blur away the world; what has changed is the appeal of the idea.

 

The trench latrine they dug when they first arrived has long since been filled over, and two more dug. The latest is not yet in need to replacing, but that will come before long.

 

Various duties are underway in and around the sleeping tents, but for those men off watch, they are gathered, as they were the night before, at the central area, attending their mending or whittling or smoking. One is whistling a little Boccherini.

 

Finally, the command tent. Lt Little and Lt Jopson are playing chess, brows furrowed, Crécy asleep on the floor under the table. Hodgson, Francis passed earlier out supervising some repairs to the sledges that were long overdue.

 

James is reading a book. All the past hour Francis’ sense has been laced with the awareness of his amusement at it.

 

 _You ought to try it_ , James tells him now. He was looking up before Francis entered the tent, ready to meet his eye. _I assure you it is not soppy at all, for all the author is female, and very droll in parts._

 

 _Perhaps, then, when you are finished_. Francis goes to his desk, tries to find a map or log to busy himself with.

 

_I could read it to you, like this, if you wished?_

 

Francis does look up now. Jopson and Little are still utterly engrossed; James has kept his broadcast solely to Francis.

 

James remains at his ease in his chair, his feet upon a stool. There is just a dot of colour in each cheek. Although, as has become usual of late, he is controlling what he shares into the sense very skilfully, he falls a little short of the casual air he is affecting.

 

Though this may in part be due to Horatio, who continues to pace up and down outside Francis’ tent, ready to be protector and champion, for all Shelagh will not admit him.

 

 _It is yet awhile till luncheon, I suppose._ Francis goes to sit down himself. He feels very clumsy, all of a sudden. _But will it not annoy you, to begin over?_

 

_Since we left England I have read this book five times. Whether this is a sixth or a seventh does not trouble me._

 

_It must be very good indeed, then?_

 

 _Well, you shall be the judge of that. Right_. James closes the volume, reopens to the first pages and settles himself.

 

Francis has nothing to occupy his hands as he listens, he realises too late. Unless he was to smoke, which he is loath to do so close to James in case it might yet jeopardise his complete recovery.

 

He resolves to watch the battle on the chessboard, but finds his eye ever returning to the reader.

 

 _Emma Woodhouse_ , James is beginning, _handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her…_

Francis does not view this as promising for his own interest in proceedings, but time slips away, and they have got several chapters in, with Francis starting to feel a certain outrage on behalf of the ‘not very genteel’ Mr Martin, before Hartnell interrupts them for their midday meal of meat and mush.

 

The afternoon is filled with inspection of the men, a formal inventory meeting, and supervision of the weather readings that keep the men occupied. They are even achieving some of the magnetic observations that were to form such a large part of their secondary mission, in case finding the passage was really too simple to justify the trip…

 

Come the evening, and after their small portion of supper, Francis is readying to bed down, moving quietly in his tent to minimise the annoyance to Shelagh in her corner.

_Would you care for some more of Miss Woodhouse’s enterprises, Francis? I was going to read for a while before sleep in any case._

Francis slows in the midst of rubbing his feet, even though he knows James cannot also see through tent walls. He takes a deep breath. Tries to have some measured and rational response to what is a simple act of a good friendship.

 

_Why yes, thank you, that is very kind._

 

For a moment the reply is not in the form of words, but just the sensation of _pleased, happy,_ and Francis can feel it as though he were there – the sensation of the novel’s leather binding under James’ fingers, the scent of the damp paper.

 

He shivers.

 

Abruptly, that stream of shared experience is ended. Before Francis can be concerned, however, the words begin again:

 

_“Not Harriet’s equal!” exclaimed Mr Knightley, loudly and warmly; and with calmer asperity added, a few moments afterwards, “No, he is not her equal indeed, for he is much her superior in sense as in situation. Emma, your infatuation about that girl blinds you. What are Harriet Smith’s claims, either of birth, nature or education to any connection higher than Robert Martin? She is the natural daughter of nobody knows whom, with probably no settled provision at all, and certainly no respectable relations…_

 

-

 

Perhaps it is partly because of what becomes two nights in a row of shared readings – Francis is quite exasperated at his own strength of feeling regarding the inadvisability of Emma’s liaison with Frank Churchill - that when Shelagh’s labour finally starts, they both know of it.

 

They are in the midst of conducting business with their Netsilik acquaintances, Francis’ linguistic abilities aided by Thomas and Dr Peddie in conversation with the man Tikerqat, who today has brought a senior man from another family with him. Both the visitors highlight the poor availability of game this summer, and the extra strain the presence of the Terror Camp is placing on their hunting grounds. They are understanding of their invaders’ position, and generous in what they will risk to help them, but the depth of their concern is also clear.

 

The Netsilik have also communicated since the first that Lady Silence discomfits them, for reasons Francis has not been told but could guess at. Today she has made the politic decision to be out hunting herself during their visit, leaving Pisces to the care of Goodsir. She evidently takes a certain angry pride in demonstrating her own capacity to supply food, pacing herself to what bounty her countrymen share with the camp, and Francis is not about to counsel her against that.

 

Nonetheless, Francis has been conversing with her across the sense for advice in these negotiations whilst also listening to Peddie talk, and translating as best he can for James along the way, when quite suddenly all his senses are filled with Shelagh.

 

Had he not experienced her heat, the sensations would be so alien as to make him feel quite ill. But he knows Shelagh to her sinews, as she does him, and though the pains and contractions of labour take his breath away, he too can appreciate them as the natural and desired sequel of the heat that has gone before.

 

In the same moment that Francis tenses, though, James is standing, and that is surprising. He too is evidently confused by it, looking over to Francis with such alarm on his face that Francis catches himself chuckling.

 

 _clear air when sky fire comes_ _!_ Horatio calls out, rising in turn.

 

Shelagh brushes her mate’s concern away – Francis fancies that the sensation could be translated to an epithet that would make a sailor blush – and informs Francis that she is not to be disturbed, thank you.

 

It is necessary to conclude the discussion with their allies, at least as far as Francis and James are concerned, and he hopes that he has been adequately able to express to the men how pressing is the business that takes him away, and how seriously he will consider their points, and soon.

 

And then he and James, and Horatio, are out of the command tent and in the sunshine, and Francis is surprised and pleased to see Pisces coming over to Horatio to nudge and groom him, soothing his agitation with deference.

 

Crécy is in the sense, informing any who care to listen that he has also gathered the news, but considers himself a little sophisticated to make such a fuss, and is smug not to be annoying Shelagh – as the wolf in the pack with the greatest experience of other litters he fancies he is somewhat an expert at a female’s whimsies at such times.

 

Shelagh is swift to inform him in turn how she takes this.

 

Leo has not noticed, yet, though he has sensed some disturbance in the chatter the wolves keep up between themselves and is pushing out enquiries.

 

Ethelred is blank as a hole in the ice. But now is not the time Francis can let himself feel that pain.

_Can you be still, and leave her in peace?_ Francis asks Horatio now, dropping to one knee to be eye to eye with him. _Your brother can dose you with the sleeping water, if you like._

Horatio huffs, and shakes himself out. Of course, he will not sleep! He must protect his mate and her den!

 

Francis glances up to see James smiling rather wistfully. “Can you make a circle on the perimeter with him?” Francis asks. “She wants to be hidden away, and if he’s at the very door she’ll be troubled.”

 

“Whatever is needed, of course.” James puts his hand to the back of his brother’s head. And then Francis hears him, clear and extraordinary, as he turns to Pisces and speaks to the other wolf. _Shall you come with me and Horatio, and help keep Shelagh safe? It is a wide circle and we are only two._

 

Perhaps more extraordinary – wonderful, for certain – Pisces draws back his shoulders and raises his head: _I shall._

_James…_

 

The man turns to look at him, and his slight, small, rather sad smile is back. _A person needs more than reading to occupy his hours. I wished to be better at this, and so I practiced. Since… since the spring, I could do this. But it is not just speaking, is it? It is finding the moment when the one you wish to address will listen._

 

Francis stares at him, not quite sure what he has heard. Then he feels Shelagh, consumed again with the cramping of her belly, starting to be just a little afraid.

 

“Go to her,” James tells him. And reaches out, and for a moment takes Francis’ hand, clasping tight before releasing, the moment ending before Francis can even realise it is happening.

 

“Let us know how it goes on.”

 

“I shall,” Francis promises. He closes his eyes. Breathes. Turns around to make for his tent.

 

At the entrance he pauses.

 

_Shelagh? My dear?_

 

She lets out a sound so like a cub that for a moment he half thinks he has missed it.

 

She is torn. She doesn’t want anyone near her - all her animal instincts say she must be alone – but with her reasoning mind she wants him, the bonded of her heart, because she is afraid for these cubs, and at this time the memories of her own cubhood haunt her.

 

She wants her cubs to be gathered up by him, as she was. She wants to do her best for them, and that feels like the best there is.

 

Wiping the back of his hand over his eyes, Francis comes carefully inside, removing his boots before kneeling in her blankets.

 

She is lying on her side, panting, eyes flashing in the dim light.

 

He puts his hands to her sides, soothing, and rides with her through another spasm of pain, and another, feeling the writhe of the muscles, and then in a slippery slide of blood and mucus the first cub is with them. A tiny little curl of wet fur, eyes closed and ears flat, and when Shelagh licks at it, cleaning, the brindle of its coat, red with a proud stripe of white, comes clear to be seen.

 

Francis breathes once, twice and then the cub does, opens its mouth and makes a squeak interpretable to any creature.

 

Shelagh prods it with her nose, and it scrambles, not able to stand but almost swimming in the blanket, dragging its little body until it has traversed the expanse between where it landed and where it can be fed.

 

The contentment of the milk! Francis has felt nothing like such perfect, unadulterated happiness as this cub’s when it starts to suck.

 

Shelagh keeps licking at it, but she is also distracted by more pain within and in a short while another small bundle arrives.

 

This one, though, is not going to breathe, or live, and has not been alive for a little while, Francis would estimate. Shelagh knows as soon as she noses at it, and Francis reaches for her with hands and sense in comfort before retrieving the cub with a bit of sacking, wrapping it carefully, cradling it in his arms.

 

A third is stillborn the same way, and Francis curses silently as he sets it neatly besides its sibling.

_Francis? What is wrong?_

_One is with us,_ Francis assures James. _Two are not. Tell Horatio gently; this is not something he can fight._

 

He turns his attention back to Shelagh, who is still labouring.

 

The fourth cub has no obvious deformity, appears well enough, but though Shelagh licks at it no sound comes, the mouth does not open, the limbs do not move.

_May I enter? Please, I can help._

 

It is James at the entrance.

 

Shelagh is snarling at once, fearful as instinct can make her. She cannot fight like this, and her cubs are the most vulnerable they can be and she must…

_James, it is James,_ Francis pushes at her urgently, and puts his hands to the back of her neck, strokes, cuddles her head. _James is Pack, you know James. He is ours, he is safe. He wants to make the cub well._

_My cubs!_ She is wracked again with a contraction.

 

“Come in, James,” Francis calls. “It won’t breathe, James, I cannot… I do not know…”

 

“I know,” James assures him, falling to his knees.

 

He takes up the fourth cub at once and pushes his fingers into its mouth, around its nose, then puts his own mouth over its muzzle, sucks and spits the mucus away before blowing down into its lungs. Grabbing up another pieces of sacking he dries the cub vigorously, rubbing roughly and all over it.

Pain is taking Shelagh again, and Francis moves to be ready for the next, still trying to watch James’ progress.

 

In James’ hands the fourth cub suddenly spasms, whines, legs kneading at the air.

_Yes, you shall have some,_ James tells it, laughing: _Yes, you shall, I promise you._

 

And he sets it down to Shelagh’s side, and now there are two, shoulder to shoulder, drinking and drinking as though nothing else in the world mattered.

 

The fifth is small, small enough that Francis’ feels a chill in his stomach, and born still covered in the birth sac, but as he tears that off, it is already nosing towards his fingers, trying to suckle. The fourth was red like its father. This fifth is pure white. Francis lifts it to the teat.

 

Shelagh grunts, and moves to lick all three of them as they feed. A few moments later the afterbirth appears, and she instantly eats it up.

 

“Three,” Francis says, and sits back – falls, nearly, collapsing from his crouch and realising his legs have gone to sleep.

 

“Three of five,” he amends. Looks again at the two little, sack-wrapped bundles. “Perhaps if I’d known what you know…”

 

“It has been too late for a while, for them,” James assures him. Somehow they have ended with James sitting next to Francis, close to him as the feeding cubs are to each other. Francis has laid his head upon James’ shoulder; does not remember deciding to do so, cannot imagine ever having the energy to move again.

 

He is aware of muted voices, and realises it is James, in the sense, reassuring Horatio who is near-frantic, pacing back and forth by the tent flap entrance, fit to dig them another latrine.

 

Pisces, Crécy and Leo are all outside the tent as well, now, and the men have gathered what is going on and their talk can also be heard through the canvas.

 

Francis finds he cannot bear the idea of addressing them. Of even leaving the tent. It is Shelagh’s den instinct, at least in part, fierce and deep.

 

But it is not just that.

 

“I don’t know why I…” his voice is heavy, he has to swallow the tears down his throat. “Losing a few… it is what happens, I did not even…”

 

“You were with her,” James is murmuring, speaking to Francis now, with his voice and softly. His arm is around Francis’ shoulders, holding him up. Francis has his face buried in James’ neck – he’ll stain the man’s coat with snot, probably already has. “You were with her, so deeply, so completely, and you have lost them too.”

 

 _A stone den_ , Shelagh says, now. She is picturing the cairns that have been built over the expedition’s dead, since they came to the island. _They must have a stone den. And they must be together. Not cold. Not lonely._

 

 _Of course_ , Francis tells her, _of course they can, they are so small that it will be easy._

 

And then he finds he is crying aloud, sobbing, shaking with it, for the cubs and for the men, for Irving, for Gore, for Le Vesconte, for the ship’s boys, for Culloden, for Aeneas, for Pisces and Ethelred and Lady Silence who lost half of themselves, even for Hickey and for Sir John; for everyone he could not save, for every death on this goddamn fool expedition that never needed to happen.

 

James’ arms are both around him. Francis is pressed, warm, tight, safe, to James’ chest. His chest, which has no bruises, now, so there is no need to worry at hurting him just from being close, from clinging on. James strokes his hair.

 

“I am here,” James tells him, aloud and in the sense, and from the way he doesn’t let go until Francis does.

 

And in a little while, once their bellies are full and their minds sleeping, Francis feels the soft pressure of Shelagh lifting the three living cubs carefully to his lap, the better to let him cradle them.

 

The brindle, the red and the white. Two males and a female, when he checks. James uses the tip of one finger to stroke at their heads as they rest in Francis’ arms, which Shelagh watches patiently enough, her own eyes drifting closed.

_Hello_ , Francis tells the cubs, very softly. He presses his lips to their heads, each in turn. _Hello._

 

James stays close at his side when, at length, Francis feels ready to rise and go out to tell the men. The Pack.

 

They are Pack, more now than ever – that much is already quite apparent. Even though Francis has witnessed it before he is still delighted to find it so again, the building strength of the sense, the way the cubs’ blunt and constant cries for attention and care bring something soft and tender to them all.

 

“Hungry little piglets,” James observes, under his breath, chuckling, just as they step over the tent threshold and into the night sun.

 

The entire crew has gathered, bar the watchmen on the perimeter.

 

“Three cubs,” Francis tells them, clearing his throat and repeating it again louder, more proudly. “Three fine cubs born!”

  
Someone – Thomas Blanky he suspects – sets up a cheer. The male wolves are crowding to him and James, excited by the scent of blood and milk and baby wolf on their clothes.

 

“Kept you some supper, sirs,” Hartnell says now. He is beaming. Everyone is. Francis can’t recall the last time the mood was so high.

 

“That would be most welcome, thank you.” James gives Francis’ elbow the smallest of taps, prompting him towards the tent with the dinner table.

 

They walk close, in step. Francis can see in the brighter light the marks where, just as he feared, his tears have stained James’ coat.

 

He would rather sleep than eat, at this moment, but he seats himself next to James all the same, raises knife and fork and tries to think what to say next.

 

James’ hair has come loose, some time in the past hours. It waves very slightly, curling at his ears.

 

“Pardon us, Captains, but we reckon a toast may be in order.”

 

Francis looks round, startled.

 

It is Lieutenants Little and Jopson, at the command tent entrance, some glasses and a bottle of something in hand. Crécy and Leo follow them, darting about like cubs themselves, and Hodgson comes in after. It is clear that no refusal can be made. Francis accepts his cup of watery lemon and tells himself how soon he can be abed.

 

“Francis.” James, whispering, urgent, leaning in toward him, when the conversation amongst the others has turned to some technicality of naval toasting practices. “Francis. Tomorrow, let us make that trip to Victory Point.”

 

“Tomorrow...?” Francis begins, perplexed. They will not set off from this camp for at least a week yet, there is no urgency for that visit to occur tomorrow when today has been so tiring.

  
And then he sees it – the vision James has, the vision of the two of them, quite alone at last, and talking.

 

Francis takes a deep breath.

 

“Yes. Yes, very well.”

 

-

 

“Have you decided how candid we are to be?”

 

“I beg your pardon?” Francis’ grip tightens, briefly, on the strings of his haversack, on the handle of his walking stick.

 

“In our message, for the cairn?” James is smiling, just a little. Just enough that Francis fancies he knew the confusion he would cause, with the first words he has said since they came out of view of Terror Camp.

 

“I thought to avoid any mention of the creature,” Francis tells him. It is not an unreasonable or unimportant question, even if it was asked in jest. “By hoping to warn good people we’d only excite foolish ones.”

 

James lets out a wry chuckle. “Oh, I’d happily live in a world with a few less foolish people in it.”

 

They walk on a little further.

 

Francis did not sleep as well as he might have liked, had woken with Shelagh’s awakenings whenever the cubs wanted to feed and every time had felt moved to examine each one of them, feeling their tiny hearts beat strong against his fingertips.

 

This morning, and with James’ help, he built the two small burial mounds, aligned with those of Irving, Le Vesconte and the rest of the east hunting party, save Mr Hickey who lies unmarked.

 

Already, outside his tent in the morning, he’d found gifts from the men; teething toys, scraps of cloth to worry apart, little morsels of food, all of which the cubs will adore soon if not quite yet. Silence had been granted leave by Shelagh to enter with her gift of dried liver - although Silence had observed to Francis afterwards that she felt the compliment was more to the liver than to herself.

 

He and James set off after breakfast. They have talked only of what might broadly be termed command matters, so far.

 

Horatio is still at the camp, proudly standing guard. It is truly just the two of them.

 

James moves gracefully, easily across the ground as he walks, yet the bulk of his uniform disguises the litheness of his limbs; or perhaps Francis merely fancies so, besotted as he is.

 

A more poetic man, Francis fancies, would draw some comparison between the uncharted mysteries of the Arctic oceans and the mazes of the human heart. But then, a more poetic man might not let himself be stuck in the Arctic in the first place.

 

The miles are steady, the view unchanging. There is a kind of peace in it, in this companionable solitude such as Francis has never previously known. He tries to treasure this; it may be than when they do speak, they will not be able to keep company comfortably again.

 

Within the cairn, when they reach it, it lies waiting for them: the brass tube like the hundreds of others they have now left abandoned in the ships. And within that, James’ note, written last year and signed by Graham Gore when it was deposited. It is like seeing a message from another planet.

 

 _All well_ _,_ states the postscript.

 

“Graham died that day,” James observes. “Sir John not long after.” He lets out a long breath.

 

James again writes most of their update, at Francis’ request. His hand is neater. Private tutors as a boy, Francis imagines. Or would have done once.

 

When he is handed the paper, Francis confines himself to one line: _And set off next week for Backs Fish River._

 

He has thought the thing through from every angle, discussed it at length with James, with the other officers, with Thomas Blanky and Dr Peddie and the Netsilik as far as possible, and it is the only plan he feels they can pursue. If they linger any longer on King William Island, they will imperil their hosts’ ability to store for the coming winter, and lose any chance of their own to get south before that strikes.

 

At every turn more obstacles present themselves; navigating the river, for example, if they make it so far, may prove beyond their skill. Not all the boats are fit for water. The men are not so ill as they were, but they are far from hearty, and the boats must be dragged hundreds of miles overland yet.

 

And the cubs must be sledded in those boats, and Shelagh with them, and Ethelred too, more than likely.

 

Francis sighs heavily. This cairn is still the nearest to England any of them may ever get.

 

The tube placed back within its sepulchre, James extracts his folding stool from his string bag and opens up his provisions. They have some water, each, and dried meat, and a little of Pisces and Goodsir’s lichen, in case their jaws were not yet sufficiently weary.

 

Francis follows his example.

 

It is only once they are refreshed, fortified in this way, that James braces his hands on his legs and takes a deep breath, visibly steadying himself.

 

And Francis is ready; the words of apology and reassurance are already on his tongue.

 

“Francis,” James begins, “do you know how I was appointed to this expedition?”

 

Once again, James Fitzjames has managed to take him quite aback. That is not the conversational opener Francis had been expecting.

 

“No, James,” he says slowly. “I can’t say I do.”

 

James is looking him in the eye. “I saved Sir John Barrow’s son from a scandal. By chance, in Singapore, I paid to have… a very base matter settled. One that would have blackened the Barrows’ name, and the Admiralty’s by association. As soon as I returned to London, I was promoted to commander. And when the Admiralty announced that there would be another attempt at the passage… well, I only had to say the word.”

 

Francis wishes James would open into the sense, alongside what he is voicing. Evidently he is driving to a point, but Francis cannot perceive what it will be.

 

“I think that only makes you a man.”

 

“Does it?”

 

“What you describe is a surplus of political luck, hm? Not a dearth of courage.”

 

“I’m a fake, Francis.”

 

Francis doesn’t know what to say. If James would only let him, he could try instead to push through his feelings on the matter – all his feelings, if he dared.

 

He does not dare. This is too confusing:

 

“I challenge any biographer to tally up your acts of valour and then call you a fake.”

 

James licks his lips, and then bites them. He has the air of one braced before a blow. “My father was a failure of the highest order, a ridiculous man who ruined himself with debts. At one happier time, though, he was Consul General in Brazil, and he and his wife would mix with all the wealthy Portuguese families in exile there.”

 

James’ gaze has drifted away; he is staring into the distance, the long, white nothing to the flat horizon. He is keeping his sense locked tight, but the tone of his voice gives away enough of what it costs him to speak of this.

 

“My mother was probably from one of those families - I was never told more. I was born out of an affair, Francis.”

 

Francis attempts to keep his mouth closed: this is astonishing. It is not supposed to be possible for a… a person of illegitimate birth, to hold rank in the Royal Navy. Not unless your erstwhile progenitor was little short of the King.

 

He hopes he would not have cared, even when Commander James Fitzjames was a man that he wished no good to. Other than, perhaps, to resent the ascendancy of someone who had started from arguably an even more challenged position than his own.

 

Now he cares, inasmuch as he has a vision, quite acutely, of why perhaps not all James’ childhood was an idyll of indulgence.

 

“I have no idea what happened to her, afterwards,” James continues, when Francis makes no outward reaction. “My father’s cousins had to find people to raise me. My name… Even my name was made up for my baptism: ‘James Fitzjames’, like a bad pun.”

 

“I didn’t know any of that.”

 

“I’ve never said it out loud, before now.” James swallows hard.

 

Francis opens his own connection to the sense further, though he can feel that the way ahead between them is still blocked. Tries to suffuse that connection with the sincerity of his wish to comfort, to ease whatever pain James might have, however James would need him to do so.

 

 _I am here_ , he says, once and again. _I am here._

 

Because that is what forgives his new feelings, is it not? That despite extraordinarily, unexpectedly loving a man – this man – deep as his bone marrow, with every beat of his heart, he would do anything to see him happy.

 

For a little while there is silence between them. James’ shoulders are hunched round. Francis looks at his own hands.

 

“I know, James, and I understand, that you may not like what you feel in the sense from me, but I think if you would open to it, it would be physic to you. That is what it is there for, between officers.”

 

“Not like?” James frowns, looking up. “But you are the one who closed the way between us. After…” he clears his throat. “When I suggested sharing the tent I… Francis, I was a walking corpse then, I would not have impugned your honour.”

 

“What? No, by no means, that is not what I…” Francis takes a deep breath. This is never something he has been any good at.

 

Sir John echoes in his head: _You’ve made yourself miserable and distant and dirty, and hard to love_

 

“You know everything of me, now,” James continues. “The very worst of my history. I did not know how I could speak of it, in fact, was not sure how I would manage. But telling you… I had to. And you know – I have told you – that I have loved men. And I wish you to know, also, because if my father had no honour, I do, and it would be wrong not to inform you that… You should know that I love you, Francis.”

 

Francis is very close to laughing aloud. Makes one blast of bitter air. “But… but that’s impossible!”

 

“Because I am a man?”

 

“Because you’re you and I’m… I’m only me.”

 

James stares at him moment. Then, slowly, beautifully, his face softens. “And you have closed your sense now, too. Open, Francis. Open, and I shall.”

 

He is holding out his hand.

 

Francis takes it. Opens.

 

-

 

They are connected, and Francis can feel James’ fingers laced with his own, palm-to-palm and warm.

 

They are connected, lying side by side on the ground, their bodies pressed together, the beat of their hearts, their need, their rhythm falling pace by pace in step with each other, heavy and hot and thrilling.

 

They are connected, their minds flowing, swirling, streaming into company, fear and hesitation melting into joy.

 

-

 

“We should be getting back to the camp,” Francis says, not without regret. He traces his fingers over the planes of James’ face, and does not move.

 

They have cleaned themselves, following that tidal surge of passion that Francis feels all too aware he could summon again in a moment, given the chance. They are fully dressed once more and they have eaten all their food. Both those tasks were intended, when commenced, to preface the return – we shall just do this, and then we shall go - but somehow time and again they have found themselves distracted by the wonder of this. Of each other.

 

They are lying on the ground, eye to eye. The sense curls and coils and wraps them close.

 

James smiles, and catches Francis’ wrist. Sucks gently at the tips of his fingers.

 

Francis groans, and punches lightly at the other man’s arm. “I said, we should go. I want to check on Shelagh and the cubs, and we cannot miss both lunch and our dinner, they’ll only send people after us.”

 

James rolls over to straddle him, leans down, kisses his mouth. His elbows come down and box Francis’ head in, closed and safe, his hair falling to cover them both.

 

But before Francis can protest any further – or indeed, before he can decide that perhaps he doesn’t have to go after all, perhaps not quite yet – James is laughing, rising, and holding out his hands to assist Francis to his feet beside him.

 

They have started walking hand in hand before Francis is aware of doing so.

 

“No, I had no idea of ever loving a man,” Francis admits, frankly, after a time. They have been doing this some little while as they go; telling each other the story of how they got here, rediscovering the journey they both have taken. “You quite astounded me, when you made that confession as to your past. And I didn’t like to think of it, at first. Took me a while, to realise most of my concern was jealousy of who had gone before.”

 

James smiles, blushing beautifully. “I was so afraid I was misunderstanding the situation. In March, in the heat, I felt… I’ve never felt like that. But I thought perhaps that it was always so. Or at least, that it could be. That you would have been quite familiar with it, and considered it nothing special.”

 

“When the brothers and the wolves are agreeable, it does not have to be a horror,” Francis agrees, tipping his head. He will not think about Sir John Franklin for one more second of today. “But I can assure you that even with James Ross, and Davy, it was nothing at all like…”

 

He stops. Stops walking.

  
Stands still upon the gravel, breathes.

 

“Francis?”

 

“Davy…” Francis says. Whispers, almost. It is an idea so new, so terribly hopeful that he scarcely dares voice it.

 

“Tell me, James, if you were the Admiralty – or, forget the fucking Admiralty, if you were Lady Franklin with all her wheedling and her ways, if you had nothing to drive your choice but ability, who would you chose to set forth and look for Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition?”

 

James frowns, but is not long in answering – he would not be, for there is only one answer to give, the man who by rights should have been appointed leader of this expedition in the first place: “Sir James Ross, more than likely, but I…”

 

“Sir James Ross,” Francis repeats. He grabs James’ face, kisses him smart and quick. “We must get back to camp as fast as we can. We must run, James, if you are able.”

 

“I assure you you’ve not worn me out as thoroughly as all that,” James shoots back.

 

And then, in the sense. _Although you are most welcome to try, some other time._

 

-

 

“Men,” Francis says. He is standing on the largest and sturdiest of the tea chests, in the centre of the camp’s open space. He has taken off his coat, sweating with the exertion of their rapid progress back from the cairn. He can feel the place on his inner thigh where James touched him earlier, clear as a brand. His heart is racing for all these reasons and more.

 

“Men,” he says, and opens to the Pack. To all of them gathered here, human and wolf and most especially the cubs, for he needs their power in this, all that raw energy of an infant’s cry.

 

“Men, we have come a long way together, now. We have sailed and we have waited and we have walked, and as I am sure you all know, soon we must walk again. That we are alive is a testament – some might say to God, I say to ourselves. To our faith in each other, to our ability to look after our brethren.

 

“Bonds grow close, on long journeys. In the Royal Navy, and in some merchant vessels that some of you may have known, we cement those bonds by the sense we share with our wolves.

 

“We do not speak of this. It is not done. It is not considered nice. But we here, men, brothers - we are beyond nice. We sailed past nice when we left Baffin Bay.”

 

He looks around at them. At all of them. Little and Jopson, Crécy between them. Hartnell. Diggle. Thomas Blanky. Dr Goodsir. Morfin. Tozer. Weekes, Watson, Gunn, Tadman, Shanks, Hedges… He could name each man here, and that man’s rank and that man’s family. There has never been a crew such as this.

 

“I know that you may not always have felt the sense with you, not as much as you may have needed. And if that is the case I am sorry. That is my fault, not my wolf’s. Not Shelagh’s.”

 

That provokes a ripple. If the men loved Shelagh before, they adore her now that the cubs have arrived. If ever Ezekiel had been able to breed her, perhaps they would not all be in the bind in which they find themselves, but if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

 

“Whatever my failings may have been,” Francis continues, “I need you all with me now. I need us all to be together. I need you all to join me in the sense, and it does not matter if you feel awkward – I am aware myself how strange it must seem, that I am asking you aloud what should be conducted slowly, and in silence, but again I promise you, this must be done. We who have done so much must now do this one thing more.”

 

He squares his shoulders, raises his head.

 

“Out there, somewhere in this northern ice desert, I believe there is a man who you may have heard of. Some of you have even met him, or had the privilege of serving with him. A man called Sir James Ross. He has a wolfbrother called Davy, and in years gone by Shelagh and I sailed with him. We had a link with him – have a link with him still. When I say I believe he is here, I say that because I believe I can feel him, because when I looked with my mind I believe I spied him, as if a light in a window many miles distant. But it was distant, too far for me to signal alone. Shelagh and I need help if we are to call him.

 

“So, I ask you – for I cannot order this. I ask you to find the wolf to whom you feel closest. Reach out to them. I have spoken to them, they are ready, they are willing to open themselves to you if you will do so in return. The cubs are too young to understand, but you can feel them, can you not? We can feel the strength of their wish to survive, and it can bolster our own. Reach out, now, and in a few moments we will put out a call like a great beacon, like a thousand bonfires, and perhaps we will not have to walk so far after all.”

 

He takes a deep breath. Looks across at James. “I cannot promise you it will work. But I promise you it is a chance worth taking.”

 

-

 

It the loudest thing Francis has ever heard, or could imagine.

 

It is almost unbearable, and entirely astounding, something like staring directly at the sun, like standing under a wave as it crashes down upon your head.

 

He felt them all open, one after another – all of the men, and Lady Silence with them, hand in hand with Dr Goodsir, her other hand on Pisces’ head.

 

Standing here in the centre of their camp, it grows, blooms, blossoms out, the greatest silent cry perhaps in human history.

 

_We are here! We are here! We are here!_

 

Himself and Shelagh, and Thomas Blanky, reached for Ross and Davy themselves along paths once trodden. The others were simply crying, the way a newborn cub cries for milk, not knowing that anyone will answer or who that person will be, only desperately aware that they must.

 

And in that moment, Francis could feel them all. His Pack. Their willingness to trust in him.

 

That in itself was terrifying.

 

But as long as he can bear to, he stands there on his box and rides it, his eyes closed, his face turned up to the sky, and he channels that cry outwards, calling and calling and calling.

 

 _If I have ever earned anything for what I have given_ , he asks of that sky, of fate, of any deity that might care to flicker into existence for this moment, _let my payment come now._

 

And there comes another sound.

 

A true one, echoing in his ears.

 

An almighty, gut-curdling roar from somewhere at their unguarded perimeter.

 

-

 

“The beast sir! The bear! It’s here!”

 

Men are shouting, rushing; milling chaos is rapidly overturning the gathering. Someone gives a scream of pain, and there is a sound of wood splintering. In one red wave the marines are making for the armoury, but there is no time to load muskets now.

 

“Francis!” It is James, at his side, pistol in hand. Francis reaches for his own.

 

Horatio is dancing next to them.

 

 _Yes, yes, go to her, go to them_ , James tells him, and he is gone.

 

“They are small,” James says to Francis, turning back. “Between him and Shelagh they might save all three. They can get far away, the bear has never shown much interest in the animals.”

 

He squeezes Francis’ hand.

 

They had today, Francis thinks, looking at him. They had one day, a few hours of knowing each other completely. That is more than many have in a whole lifetime.

 

He does not speak the words in any form, but somehow he knows James hears them.

 

Together, they start making their way towards the noise.

 

And are overtaken.

 

Whilst all the others flee – and marines are not yet armed and rallied to charge – one other walks as they are walking, towards their attacker.

 

Lady Silence. Walking rather than running, but not moving slowly, even though one might feel from the set of her limbs that she would prefer to be, that she is dreading reaching her destination.

 

The roaring has stopped. Only the shouts of men are audible now.

 

With James, Francis rounds the side of the outermost tent and there it is.

 

Exposed in the daylight, the Tuunbaaq is both a terrible and pitiable sight. It looks – feels, he can feel it, he realises – so very, very alone.

 

It could kill any of them with one paw.

 

It tore Evans in half, and not even to eat, Francis remembers.

 

Silence moves to the very edge of the camp. She sinks to her knees, hands open to her sides, and bows her head.

 

The creature snarls at her, paces one way and then the next. Huffs steam from its strange, hideous parody of a nose.

 

Was this a human, once, this sprit? Perhaps only something human could be so angry.

 

Mouth inches from Silence’s head, the creature opens its jaws. Francis moves to cock his gun, is aware of James aiming his.

 

_Enough!_

 

Coming up from behind them, other, smaller paws upon the ground.

 

 _Enough!_ Shelagh says again, and passes by James and Francis and up to where Silence kneels, and sets her head back, meeting the creature eye to eye.

 

It is only the hold James takes on his arm that stops Francis running to her, stops him forcing her out of the way, ready shield her with his own body if he has to.

 

Her belly is still swollen, and her teats full, a little milk dripping down upon the barren ground.

 

 _Enough death_ , Shelagh says. She has her Pack with her, they all spoke with her, through her, not minutes ago, and she is almost rippling with the power. _Enough. No more._

 

Silence, too, is distressed by Shelagh’s arrival. She tries to stand and falls again, as if exhausted, and then attempts to fling her arms around Shelagh’s body and conceal her.

 

There is another flurry of sound behind them, and Francis turns and yells at the marines to _hold fire, hold fire goddamn you, wait._ They obey, and it is only afterwards that he realises he didn’t think to speak aloud.

 

The Tuunbaaq has its great, strange head tilted to one side, looking at Shelagh. She is not the largest of wolves in any case, but she looks like some toy dog breed beside it. Nonetheless, her head is still up, defiant.

 

It moves nearer. Sniffs at her.

 

Then takes a half step away and roars again, something like a howl.

 

This time, Silence succeeds in standing. Francis hears a gasp – Goodsir, he can tell, watching from back at the marines’ line.

 

Silence holds out her hands to the creature. They are empty and horribly vulnerable – Francis can almost hear the crunch of bone if those jaws bit down.

 

She is apologising to it, Francis thinks, from what the sense tells. She is offering it what she can – offering herself – but she knows, already, that this will never be sufficient, that she is not ready, and she is so very, very sorry.

 

“Francis…” James whispers at him, and Francis turns to follow his gaze and sees another wolf coming to the standoff.

 

It is Ethelred.

 

Moving as though each step were painful, pitifully thin, but moving.

 

Ignoring Shelagh, he comes to stand with Silence, and then he ducks his head and walks around the Tuunbaaq’s leg like a kitten might with a Doberman.

 

Francis had never fancied he would see the creature look _surprised._

 

He is conscious, alongside his acute awareness of what is unfolding before him, of the fear and distress in the rest of the camp. Of Horatio and Leo with the cubs in Shelagh’s den, unsure whether to move them or try and defend where they are as best they can, terrified for Shelagh and for how these cubs will live if she does not.

 

Most of the men are gathered in a sensible defensive formation under Little and Jopson’s direction, but some of them want to run, to run and run like some antelope on a plain, and if they do they may never find their way back.

 

Francis closes his eyes. _Wait_ , he tells them, as best he can.

And he walks forward, and goes to stand next to his sister. Shelagh butts her head against his leg, almost calm.

 

Through her, through Silence, Francis addresses the monster before him:

 

 _We are keeping our Pack safe,_ he says. _That is all. I know you have been hurt. I know we hurt you, but it was not these men who did so. If your revenge is incomplete, take me if you like, but do not hurt my wolf. Do not hurt my Pack._

 

 _You can kill me too, if you kill him_. James, coming to stand at his side. _You might as well._

  
“Is now the time for humour?” Francis hisses at him, but reaches acros the short distance between them, hooks their fingers together.

 

The Tuunbaaq has remained unmoving, watching them.

 

When it shifts its gaze, it is to Lady Silence, and then to Ethelred.

 

Ethelred stares back. The wolf stares at Tuunbaaq with the attention he would not give to anything or anyone since his brother died.

 

Tuunbaaq licks him, very carefully, on the nose.

 

Then it starts turning, and begins to move away.

 

It has taken a few steps when it stops, and looks back towards them all. Towards Silence.

 

Francis sees her take a deep breath. She shifts, crunching on the gravel.

  
And then pauses.

 

She does not turn. She does not entreat with her eyes. She simply holds a hand out behind herself, reaching, as though she cannot bear to witness the moment she is refused.

 

But Goodsir goes to her at once. And when he puts his hand in hers, she catches it up and kisses fiercely at his knuckles.

 

“I have no idea how you’ll put this in the log, Captain Crozier,” Goodsir says, not tearing his eyes from Silence. “But I am going, now.”

 

Francis wonders if he will manage to even lift a pen again, as weak with relief as he feels. He puts a hand to Shelagh’s head, steadying himself.

 

“Fear not, Doctor. I daresay Commander Fitzjames can spin a tale for us all.”

 

Hidden in the space between them, James’ grip on his fingers tightens and releases.

 

When Silence and Goodsir move, Pisces moves with them. So much Francis was already expecting.

 

And so they set off. The beast, the woman, the man and the two wolves, across the wide, empty land, and out of sight.

 

-

EPILOGUE

-

 

_August 1848_

 

“People believe in ghosts and ghouls and three-headed men and the Scylla and Charybdis,” Francis opines, sitting back in his chair and refilling his pipe. “It’s the normal things they won’t be able to credit. Hickey and Dr Stanley, or the failure of the cans, or the fact that men who know they have consumption tell lies when coming aboard and say they do not, and die months into a voyage of what would have killed them just as fast on land.”

 

He reaches to the lamp to light a taper, puts it to the pipe’s bowl, sucks at the stem. “And it is the normal things that kill men, and women, every day, in the normal world, such as people see all the time. Which is perhaps why they do not choose to think on the topic.”

 

At his feet, Shelagh yawns and shifts onto her other side. Horatio, who is lying beside, licks her face. The pups clamber over her, the better to reach newly exposed teats, and soon settle again.

 

Fidelis, the brindle. Spero, the red. And Caritas, the small, white female who already has her brothers obedient to all her wishes.

 

This is what Francis is taking home with him, from this journey. These cubs, and their mother’s name.

 

And James. James whose name could stand for every good thing in the world, as far as Francis is concerned.

 

Smiling, Francis reaches out through the sense and across the distance that propriety demands should separate them even as they sit alone here in the great cabin of HMS Enterprise, nudging at James who sits engrossed in the Enterprise’s copy of _Pride and Prejudice_.

 

 _I am paying attention, I assure you my dear_ , James tells him, _but you will never believe who has accepted Mr Collins’ proposal._

_Stop reading ahead, damn you. Save it for later._

Elsewhere on the ship, the former crew of the Franklin expedition are eating and sleeping and relaxing, and hoping and dreaming and living in a hundred different ways; Francis can feel them all, a little. Though the sense in this Pack has settled to something more like normal, following the great Call, reaching for them is always easy now.

 

Horatio and Davy are not friends, it is fair to say, but Horatio appreciates Davy’s role in the rescue of the crew, and of his cubs – he is very careful to emphasise always that they are his.

 

James Ross and James Fitzjames had more in common than their Christian names, when last in company, and they have a few more things in common now, though everyone has been too polite to point it out, but Francis fancies – not without a little strange, proud pleasure – that there too has been a certain demarcation of ownership, a certain… jealousy?

 

When Davy had called back to Shelagh in the sense, faintly and then more clear, starting the very next day from the great call to him, Francis even then would have said Ross and the prospect of rescue would be the dearest sight in all the world to him - bar one.

 

And at this moment indeed Francis is blessed with that very thing, for James – his James – puts down the book and smiles at him.

 

_Whether people believe a story is all in the telling, Francis. And I have been thinking – you said once that I could spin a tale to cover us all. There must be a book, I believe, and I must be the one to write it, before some fool does who was never even there._

 

_Must there be?_

_Oh, not for fame._ James assures him, perceiving the shape of his anxiety almost before he can himself. _For the money. For the good money people will pay to sit in their snug armchairs and picture themselves amongst the ice. For enough money to ensure that you, and I, and our wolves, never have to sail out of safe harbour again._

James has an image in his mind, and he shares it between them now. It is not fully formed – the background fuzzy, somewhere warm, somewhere perhaps like where James’ mother’s people may have come from, but perhaps not, perhaps an English farm, perhaps the colonies.

 

Clear and central, though, in this view, are two men. Side by side. Hand in hand. A red wolf, and a white, sleep peacefully on the floor between them, all curled up together.

 

Francis has no words for how much he wants it, but James is here in the sense, is with him; they see each other quite plain.

 

It is somewhere neither of them has ever been.

 

It is home.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
